Christopher Hitchens was, as Tom Piatak once wrote in our pages, “the purest neocon.” He was also, as George Scialabba has assayed, “an ornament of Anglo-American literary journalism.” I had read more polemic against Hitchens than of Hitchens himself until I picked up a copy of his Thomas Jefferson: Author of America and found myself compelled to recognize him as a writer first and ideologue a distant second — the only way any essayist of first rank should be evaluated. Read him, even if you shouldn’t believe him.