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
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