Mortality

By: Christopher Hitchens

Narrated by: Simon Prebble

Length: 2 hrs and 11 mins

Publisher's summary

On June 8, 2010, while on a book tour for his best-selling 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 18 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.

©2012 Christopher Hitchens (P)2012 Hachette Audio

Profound, humorous, touching

An intimate picture of end of life. A reminder to live life as much as we can while we can. Hitch did it till the end and lucky us we got to read his inner dialog on the journey. Made even more incredible to hear him like this long after he is gone. Beautiful.

Hitchens: A Unique Voice to the End

While I may not have always agreed with Christopher Hitchens, I always admired him. He was a light whose brilliance could not be denied, a writer and thinker whose unique voice resounded through the last 40 years of British and American culture. Mortality is a short collection of essays written by Hitchens in the last 18 months of his life, a clear-eyed view of his experience with esophageal cancer and the various treatments he endured in hopes of buying some time.

The thing I loved most about Hitch is that he was never afraid to say out loud or in print what other people were probably thinking but generally kept to themselves. Here, he has plenty to say about clichéed cancer metaphors and euphemisms (like "battling cancer," which comes with the built-in assumption that those who "lose the battle" just haven't fought hard enough). He's at his best telling stories about the hypocrites around him, like the woman in a checkout line who tells him about a relative who had liver cancer, beat it for awhile, then got it again and died--in her opinion, "because he was gay." Was this intended to give Hitchens--a staunch atheist--hope, push him towards a god who would be so feebly vengeful ("Why not a lightning bolt?"), or what? Hitchens is also brutally honest about the devastation of both cancer and chemotherapy--honest, but without wallowing in self-pity. It's as if his own body has become a subject of observation and investigation.

While it's sad, yes, to have lost Christopher Hitchens, Mortality isn't the depressing read you might imagine. It reflects the humor, brilliance, vitality, and clear-eyed realism that readers came to expect from him.

Very finely read by Simon Prebble, with a heartbreaking epilogue by written and read by Hitchens's wife, Carol Blue.

Amazing. Nothing short of amazing.

I am someone who considers themselves devout in their faith.

Christopher Hitchens’ View of God and religion is absolutely scathing. Yet, his ability to articulate just what he despises about God, religion and its attendants is nothing short a brilliant and effusive.

His prose Is thick with description and heavy with everything I love about the writing of the masters like Virginia Woolf and Dostoyevsky. The texture of his speech is so palpable that you cannot help but visualize every word. His command of the language is so purposeful and eloquent that you can hate what he is saying but I absolutely adore how he says it.

I can’t believe how much respect I have for the talents of a man who has absolutely no respect for almost the enormity of all that hold dear. But talent is talent. And his talent is undeniable.

A great book from a great man.

A short but captivating book about a courageous man contemplating. his mortality. A sobering and honest account of a brave man facing death. written as only Christopher Hitchens can.

Humor and Sadness: all wrapped up into one.

In contrast to what Richard Dawkins had to say about Christopher Hitchens as an orator (“he was the greatest orator of our time”), in my review of the Audible selection God Is Not Great, I referred to Hitchens’ mumbling narration. And then, the author literally loses his voice. I was angry. Angry at the poor production of the piece which might have had less to do with the narrator and more to do with the producer. But angry more that I could not literally or figuratively hear more of the wonderful voice that was Christopher Hitchens.

Mortality is a very short description of the diagnosis, treatment and last days of the author’s life. While incredibly sad for those among us who admired him so, in these last examples of his work, I believe we mostly hear joy and good humor. I admired the intellect of Christopher Hitchens more than anything and so many scholars of his calibre lack that sense of humor or at least do not include it as part of their literary works; not Hitchens. Here he is funnier than sh*t right to the end.

I often found myself comparing Hitchens in Vanity Fair with Hunter S. Thompson in Rolling Stone. I mostly agreed with both politically up until the Iraq War. Here there seemed to be a dramatic shift in Hitchens’ politics. Most of us on the Left embraced him as one of ours till suddenly he seemed to turn NeoCon. Well maybe he didn’t really. Here we go pigeonholing him and I think a person of Hitch’s stature deserves better than to be labeled left, right or center. “God knows,” one could probably never label him any one of those. We all could embrace Christopher Hitchens as one of ours. It was humanity that he was really all about after all and not any particular politique. Hitchens remained a polemicist right to the end and these essays are here to prove it.

Sorry that you have left us, Hitch. You leave a hole in contemporary, scholarly debate that may not soon be filled.

a raw view of illness

This is written in the first person. It explores through an intimate narrative, a writers struggle with the gradual loss of dignity, as he battles degradation and humiliation by cancer. It is candid, and eloquent, but not for the faint of heart.

A sharp wit until the end

Any additional comments?

All too brief, these writings from Hitchens's final months (previously appearing, in slightly different form, in Vanity Fair) have all of his characteristic wit, bite, insight, erudition, and bluntness. The final chapter before the afterward perhaps should have been more tightly curated (it consists of his fragmentary writing, yet to be finished at his death, but also clearly represents bits and pieces of completed works from the earlier chapters). But on the whole, it is welcome to have been invited in to his thoughts as he neared the end, free of any divine pleas or saccharine sentiment. Just good old Hitchens.

Essential for anyone that has or knows someone with cancer; great for anyone that accepts they will die one day.

I’ve come close to death many times in my life and profession. Only one time was it a slow process that gave me time to accept my own mortality. Luckily, I survived. My father was recently diagnosed with cancer and he will not survive. This book doesn’t make anything easier. However, it will give an enlightened perspective.

I'm sorry and sad that he is gone.

I hang on every word as if he were a prophet. I love and admire him without ever meeting face to face

Thank you, Christopher

After chapter 9, written by his wife, I can only say:
While My Guitar Gently Weeps