Mortality

LoveReading Says

September 2012 Book of the Month.

How acclaimed author and journalist Christopher Hitchens is taken “from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady”. Cancer had struck and these last essays convey the struggle of the living as they drift further towards this land where medical men “battle” with your illness and where the treatment can often seem worse than the disease itself.

He casts a stark eye over his own physical condition, the weakness, the pain and the way the disease crowds out almost everything else. A spare book that both saddens and heartens for it is our life that matters in the end not our death or our final destination. The book ends with the brief notes Christopher Hitchens made before he died and an afterword by his wife Carol Blue.

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About Mortality

Based on his columns in Vanity Fair that chronicled his year-and-a-half battle with esophageal cancer, Mortality is Christopher Hitchens at his most honest and reflective . Thoughtfully meditating on the harrowing effects of illness and treatment on the body, and on the impermanence and acceptance of a life ending, Mortality is Hitchens' magnum opus, and in true Hitchens form, he has the last word.

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