a former Church of England minister. Yvonne would later be found dead in Athens, having entered into a suicide pact with her lover. It was her son's melancholy duty to identify her from photos taken at the scene and to live with the fact that she had tried to call him several times in London. Out of this "lacerating, howling, moment" comes a beautifully written tribute to his "exotic", "sunlit" mother. If Hitchens is to be believed -- and apart from his syllogisms he ?is -- his reasons for becoming American were as trivial as liking the Mamas and the Papas; being "ravished" by California Dreamin', skyscrapers, the Lone Ranger and Rawhide -- "So many cattle; so much emptiness..." Awarded a Coolidge Atlantic Crossing, or Pathfinder Scholarship, he was fascinated to meet the endowing patron, Mr William Appleton Coolidge, "a direct descendant of Thomas Jefferson through the Randolph family of Massachusetts". When Americans landed on the moon, the writer exalted. The happy recipient of "extraordinary hospitality", both arranged and spontaneous, the 21-year-old could now see for himself the manifold paradoxes rampant in the land of the free. And then there were the women of America -- so "forward" and generous. "I don't think," says Hitchens, "that I can even begin sufficiently to express my gratitude," a sentiment pre-empted by a note at the start of his memoir which speaks to "those I have loved, or who have been so lenient and gracious as to have loved me, I have not