In the genre of atheist criticism of religion, Hitchens' book fills a niche. Where, for example, Bertrand Russel approaches religion with a philosophical mind, and Richard Dawkins approaches religion with a scientific mind, Hitchens approaches religion with a literary mind. This makes for some fresh and caustic athiest insights that you might not expect to find in either Russell or Dawkins. Hitchens, for example, begins his book by offering three quotes from classic pieces of literature, and within the first few pages he also alludes to George Eliot's "Middlemarch" without even mentioning Eliot's name (presuming his readers will know who wrote "Middlemarch"). In other words, Hitchens is a man of letters writing to educated, thoughtful people with more than a smattering of English literature classes in their background. In this sense, Hitchens, unlike Russell or Dawkins, leads his readers not just to think their way through the book's issues, but to feel them emotionally, in the way that one might feel one's way through a novel by Dostoevsky. Hitchens is always on the side of suffering individuals, and resists at every turn religion's dogmatism and "one size fits all" obtuseness. And in this sense Hitchens has hit upon an angle to come at religion that is not usually trodden: popular religion, unlike great literature, resists the tragic, the ambiguous, and the particular. Thus if you love literature, and identify with frail humanity via literature, you will resist the easy platitudes of religion. It is not just science and religion that are in tension for Hitchens, but literature and religion, or more accurately, the literary sensibility and religion.
(from http://bestdocumentaries.blogspot.com)