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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During the US book tour for his memoir, Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens collapsed in his New York hotel room to excoriating pain in his chest and thorax. As he would later write in the first of a series of deeply moving Vanity Fair pieces, he was being deported 'from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady.' Over the next year he underwent the brutal gamut of modern cancer treatment, enduring catastrophic levels of suffering and eventually losing the ability to speak.
Mortality is the most meditative collection of writing Hitchens has ever produced; at once an unsparingly honest account of the ravages of his disease, an examination of cancer etiquette, and the coda to a lifetime of fierce debate and peerless prose. In this eloquent confrontation with mortality, Hitchens returns a human face to a disease that has become a contemporary cipher of suffering.
