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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C: Because Cowards Get Cancer Too, John Diamond
On June 8, 2010, while on a book tour for his bestselling memoir, Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens was stricken in his New York hotel room with excruciating pain in his chest and thorax. As he would later write in the first of a series of award-winning columns for Vanity Fair, he suddenly found himself being deported "from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady." Over the next eighteen months, until his death in Houston on December 15, 2011, he wrote constantly and brilliantly on politics and culture, astonishing readers with his capacity for superior work even in extremis. Throughout the course of his ordeal battling esophageal cancer, Hitchens adamantly and bravely refused the solace of religion, preferring to confront death with both eyes open. In this riveting account of his affliction, Hitchens poignantly describes the torments of illness, discusses its taboos, and explores how disease transforms experience and changes our relationship to the world around us. By turns personal and philosophical, Hitchens embraces the full panoply of human emotions as cancer invades his body and compels him to grapple with the enigma of death.Mortality is the exemplary story of one man's refusal to cower in the face of the unknown, as well as a searching look at the human predicament. Crisp and vivid, veined throughout with penetrating intelligence, Hitchens's testament is a courageous and lucid work of literature, an affirmation of the dignity and worth of man.
| Primary Genre | Biographies & Autobiographies |
| Recommendations: |
On June 8, 2010, while on a book tour for his bestselling memoir, Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens was stricken in his New York hotel room with excruciating pain in his chest and thorax. Throughout the course of his ordeal battling esophageal cancer, Hitchens adamantly and bravely refused the solace of religion, preferring to confront death with both eyes open.
Mortality features in the following genres: Biographies & Autobiographies, Books of the Month, eBooks of the Month, Biography, Literature and Literary studies, Recommendations
Paperback, Hardback, Ebook. Not Available.
Mortality was written by Christopher Hitchens and published by Grand Central Publishing
Mortality has 104 pages
