Book description
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.
Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011) was a contributing editor to
Vanity Fair and a columnist for Slate. He was the author of numerous
books, including works on Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, George
Orwell, Mother Teresa, Henry Kissinger and Bill and Hillary Clinton,
as well as his international bestseller and National Book Award
nominee, god Is Not Great. His memoir, Hitch-22, was nominated for the
Orwell Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
