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.

Author: Christopher Hitchens
Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Twelve
Published: 09/04/2012
Pages: 128
Weight: 0.65lbs
Size: 7.60h x 5.30w x 0.60d
ISBN: 9781455502752


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 07/30/2012 pg. 51
Booklist 08/01/2012 pg. 10
Kirkus Reviews 08/15/2012
New York Times Book Review 09/02/2012 pg. 1
New York Times Book Review 09/09/2012 pg. 22
People Weekly 09/17/2012 pg. 52
Shelf Awareness 09/14/2012
Publishers Weekly Best Books 11/05/2012 pg. 33
Kirkus Best Nonfiction 12/01/2012 pg. 19
Kirkus Reviews Fall Preview 08/15/2012 pg. 22
BookPage 09/01/2012

About the Author
Christopher Hitchens was a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, Slate, and the Atlantic, and the author of numerous books, including works on Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and George Orwell. He also wrote the international bestsellers god Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, Hitch-22: A Memoir, and Arguably. He died in December 2011.