by Philo Gabriel

Created on: October 12, 2009   Last Updated: May 27, 2010

First off, this is a very thin book. It's like a fairly long magazine article, easily readable in one day.

Even with that, there's a certain amount of repetition, and if anything it feels like there's less meat than one might expect even in something of this length.

It's an "attack" piece in a sense, but I didn't find it as vicious, angry and hyperbolic as some readers might. I actually thought the tone was calm and reasoned, and the criticisms measured and argued for rather than spewed as a rant.

I think it'll seem offensive and inappropriate if you come to it with the presumption that criticizing a person is inherently disrespectful (especially if not mitigated with lots of qualifications and balancing praise), or that specifically people associated with religion (at least the reader's religion) are not to be subject to criticism, or even more specifically that Mother Teresa herself is above criticism. But without such an assumption, I just don't see it as crossing any kind of line. It doesn't come close to a true "hatchet job."

It's also interesting that Hitchens points out more than once that the primary fault for the overrating of Mother Teresa lies with the adulatory press and public, that indeed she's been quite straightforward about some of the things he criticizes, but people choose to ignore that because they prefer the inaccurate image of her they have in their minds. (He's being just a little disingenuous here in praising her for her frankness in not lying about herself and her aims, since at other times he indicates he sees her as being pretty savvy and self-aware about manipulating people and their perceptions of her and her work. But his point is a valid one, that sometimes people see what they want to see.)

What are some of the specific criticisms Hitchens raises?

1. Mother Teresa's primary focus was proselytizing for her fundamentalist or right wing brand of Catholicism. The feel-good charitable works that everyone associates her with were a lower priority, or a means to the end of that proselytizing. She used the "bully pulpit" of her celebrityhood far more to advocate for her religious beliefs concerning abortion and birth control and such, than to advocate for the poor.

2. Mother Teresa raised enormous amounts of money, that surely almost all donors believed was going toward her charitable work. In fact, much of it accumulated into bigger and bigger piles or was used for other purposes (i.e., furthering her religious agenda), while comparatively

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