His fatwah envy apparently unsatisfied by the response to his recent Vanity Fair essay explaining why women aren’t funny, erudite bovver boy Christopher Hitchens sets out to piss off the rest of the world with this contribution to the growing canon of neo-atheist tracts.

Needless to say, Hitchens hasn’t come up with any new arguments against theism, but heaven knows he has the rhetorical chops to put a fresh spin on even the hoariest rejoinder to Pascal’s wager. Tonally and stylistically he’s leagues ahead of earnest debating-club champ like Sam Harris (Letter to a Christian Nation), to say nothing of the shrill and rigid Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), whose jabbing forefinger left me with a badly bruised collarbone even though I was already pretty much on his side. Hitchens uses anecdotes about the poisoned fruits of faith that tend to be eyewitness accounts gathered in battle zones and exotic theocracies, places your average man of letters never gets around to visiting.

The good bits here combine the effortless authority of the best of Hitchens’s best cultural criticism and the buzzing argumentative energy that marks even his nuttiest political commentaries. But the book is distinctly front-loaded, and after the first 40 dazzling pages, a lot of the prose starts to feel rushed. And his cutesy habit of referring to various religious and historical figures as “this mammal” gets old pretty quickly.—Cliff Doerksen