Mortality by Christopher Hitchens (English) Hardcover Book

Description: Mortality by Christopher Hitchens Courageous, insightful and candid thoughts on malady and mortality from one of the worlds most celebrated writers. FORMAT Hardcover LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description 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 mans 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, Hitchenss testament is a courageous and lucid work of literature, an affirmation of the dignity and worth of man. Author Biography Christopher Hitchens was a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, Slate, and the Atlantic, and the author of numerous books, including works on Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and George Orwell. He also wrote the international bestsellers god Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, Hitch-22: A Memoir, and Arguably. He died in December 2011. Review "A book driven by his desire to look death squarely in the face and provoked by detractors who were certain he would turn to religion when confronted with it. He did not... [MORTALITY is] full of humility, a humility worthy of kings."--Newsday"A jovially combative riposte to anyone who thought that death would silence master controversialist Hitchens."--Kirkus Reviews (Starred) "Dealing unflinchingly with bodily ravagement, reflecting on lifes beauty and remaining rakish about his ideological foes, Hitchens proves that great writers are truly immortal."--People, 4-star review"Like virtually everything he wrote over his long, distinguished career, diamond-hard and brilliant . . .vivid, heart-wrenching and haunting - messages in a bottle tossed from the deck of a sinking ship as its captain, reeling in agony and fighting through the fog of morphine, struggles to keep his engines going . . . a final, defiant, and well-reasoned defense of his non-God-fearingness . . . It is, however, sobering and grief-inducing to read this brave and harrowing account of his year of living dyingly in the grip of an alien that succeeded where none of his debate opponents had in bringing him down."--Christopher Buckley, New York Times Book Review"Mortality is a crash course in lived philosophy....bracing."--Salon"Mortality is not just for Hitchens fans, but for all.... With almost unimaginable clarity, grace and wit, even for the master wordsmith we had grown used to. We see here a very warm and thoughtful human being. Poignant and deeply personal thoughts on the art of writing and the heartbreak of losing his unmistakable speaking voice during the course of treatment....The furthest thing from grim, Mortality is a gift. Not just from Christopher, but from Carol as well. Do pick it up."--Huffington Post"Mortality, the final book by Christopher Hitchens, the Anglo-American essayist, reporter, devout atheist and all-around intellectual troublemaker, wont be shelved in the travel section. But in a sense thats where it belongs, along with the best of the literary travel writers. Think George Orwell, one of Hitchens heroes....Few writers wrote sharper sentences or treated words with more respect."--USA Today, "The 25 Big Books of Fall""Remarkable . . . The books power lies in its simplicity, in its straightforward, intelligent documenting, its startling refusal of showiness or melodrama or grandeur....The great polemicist, essayist, conversationalist, provocateur, arguer, has done something extraordinary in this book. He has created yet another style, another mode, another way of being and thinking and dreaming, on his death bed; he has written in many ways an un-Hitchens-like book, eluding proclamations, resolutions, mastery, wit, at-easeness with opinion, in favor of unnerving directness, of harrowing documentation. He has allowed his dismantled confidence, his undoing to breathe, and to live in the pages, in a way that is startling and new and an achievement unlike his others, different in kind, yet equally ambitious and relentlessly honest."--Katie Roiphe, Slate.com"Stark and powerful... Hitchenss powerful voice compels us to consider carefully the small measures by which we live every day and to cherish them."--Publishers Weekly (Starred)"The melancholy irony of Mortality is that it gave our best essayist - I cant think of someone who comes even close - the chance to grapple with the most intractable subject, to wrestle with the angel of death in a battle we will all have to lose at one time or another.....The voice is gone. The words remain."--The New York Daily News"There are no clever pitches to diminish the horror vacui of oblivion. He offers no self-pity or special pleading. The book is tough-minded . . . poignant, but the poignancy is ours, not his."--Wall Street Journal"These essays are brave and fitting final words from a writer at the end of his journey."--Bookpage"This trenchant, sassy, tragically posthumous little black book earns a proud spot on the end-of-life shelf, along with Julian Barnes Nothing to Be Frightened Of, Joan Didions The Year of Magical Thinking, Leo Tolstoys The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Joan Wickershams The Suicide Index, Saul Bellows Ravelstein, and Philip Roths Everyman and Exit Ghost, to name just a few."--NPR.org"To the end, he produces sentences of startling beauty and precision . . . One of our best is gone, yet "Mortality" is a powerful and moving final utterance."--San Francisco Chronicle"Unsparingly blunt, rhetorically suave . . . Its rare that someone so powerfully writes of such deep connections between the death of intellectual ability and the decay of the body."--Boston Globe Review Quote "Whether hes dodging bullets in Sarajevo, dissing Bill Clinton, (with whom he says he shared a girlfriend at Oxford) or explaining his switch from leftist to Iraq war supporter, this foreign correspondent, pundit, and bon vivant makes for an enlightening companion. Give HITCH 22 an 11 out of 10 for smarts, then double it for entertainment value." Details ISBN1455502758 Author Christopher Hitchens Short Title MORTALITY Language English ISBN-10 1455502758 ISBN-13 9781455502752 Media Book Format Hardcover DEWEY 304.64 Residence Washington, DC, US Death 2011 Year 2012 Place of Publication New York Country of Publication United States AU Release Date 2012-09-04 NZ Release Date 2012-09-04 UK Release Date 2012-09-04 Pages 128 Publisher Little, Brown & Company Imprint Grand Central Publishing Audience General Publication Date 2012-09-04 US Release Date 2012-09-04 We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:44693797;

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