About this book
Courageous, insightful and candid thoughts on malady and mortality from one of our most celebrated writers. 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. Crisp and vivid, veined throughout with penetrating intelligence, Mortality is Hitchens's testament; a courageous and lucid work of literature, an affirmation of the dignity and worth of man.
About Christopher Hitchens
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS was born in 1949 in England and was a graduate of Balliol College at Oxford University. He was the father of three children and the author of more than twenty books and pamphlets, including collections of essays, criticism, and reportage. His book, god Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award and an international bestseller. His bestselling memoir, Hitch-22, was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. A visiting professor of liberal studies at the New School in New York City, he was also the I.F. Stone professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He was a columnist, literary critic, and contributing editor at Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, Slate, Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, New Statesman, World Affairs, Free Inquiry, among other publications. Christopher Hitchens died in December 2011 at the age of 62.
[(Source)][1]
[1]: http://penguinrandomhouse.ca/authors/43227/christopher-hitchens
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