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.
