Mortality (2012)

Sometimes you run into something so profound that captivates you in ways you did not even anticipate were possible. Perhaps that is what Art is?
I can confidently say that this book is a must read.

I'll insult it no further by pretending to be worthy of an honest review. ( )

A surprisingly patient and sympathetic book about Hitchens own final time as a cancer patient before dying surrounded by his family and friends. Hitchens gives his own objections to God and intellectual peacemaking to instead making the most of his time with his family. He seems to have respected Pascal the most of the many philosophical figures whom Hitchens thinks worthy of consideration. Hitchens spends more than the usual amount of time reflecting on Nietzsche and then asking for some books by Chesterton. Hitchens tries to plumb the depths of his true feelings and not artificial constructs from established traditions of religious experience. An unusual book but short enough to gain insight from it, it one choses that path. ( )

(59) This slim memoir of being diagnosed with advanced esophageal cancer from a famous commentator and essayist who died in 2011. Truth be told, I was not too familiar with Hitchens though it seems I should have been. Based on what little I gleaned of him from sources prior to reading the book, I expected this to be more profound. It is a loose collection of untitled essays billed as chapters about the horrendous realization of a life-threatening diagnosis followed by all the indignities of cancer treatment and decline. Topics that I too have lived though mercifully survived - I can certainly relate to the stark difference between the lands of 'Tumortown,' and 'Wellness.'

I suspect that this is not his best work and I am inspired to read more by him. His musings on religion tell the unvarnished truth that we are all betting against. I liked that there was not much sentimentality here - I have read some incredible books by authors that have intimate knowledge of death and dying (Paul Kalinithi's 'When Breath Becomes Air, and John Gunther's 'Death Be Not Proud,' come to mind) Hitchens is the first I've read that avoids the elegiac in favor of the prosaic. I sense that he had a lot more to say on the subject had he had the chance. ( )

I always enjoy reading Hitchens, though this, naturally, was a bittersweet experience. An eminently erudite and eloquent insight into the process of death. As with life, all too brief. ( )

Christopher Hitchens never met a fight he didn't like, but he did meet one he couldn't win. Written during is battle with esophageal cancer, the book contains his thought on crossing into the land of the sick. I found myself especially moved over is concern of losing his voice and his ability to write, which for this man, would be worse than death. Anyone looking for a last minute change of heart on the God question will be disappointing, but then Christopher Hitchens wouldn't mind that at all. ( )