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

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.

brilliant and moving

beautifully told unsentimental first person account of living with and dying from cancer by witty and courageous CH

words

Words belong to hitch. I only continue because audible makes me. Read this book now

Death conquers any philosophy

These short essays left me with a strong sense of the despair, misery and hope for survival that (I suppose) all humans go through when they know their life is threatened. To me, this was a naked reminder that ideas, philosophies, brains, money, everything, stops in their tracks when the animal called human is facing death.
Be prepared to get depressed - at least i was, a lot. Maybe religion does have a serious purpose - to allow us to hope that this miserable end has a purpose, and that it's not the end.

Even in the end Christopher didn't dissapont!!!

Where does Mortality rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

I love anything that Christopher Hitchens writes so this was a special book for me because I knew that it was his last. And in true Hitch fashion he was honest and candid right to the end.

What was one of the most memorable moments of Mortality?

I love when he talks about how there needs to be a cancer school to teach people what to say to those that have cancer... And I loved what his wife Carol Blue had to say at the end of the book about him.

What does Simon Prebble bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

I can't say that he brings anything one way or another... nothing against him but when you are used to hearing/listening to Christopher for so many years you just expect to hear his voice.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

Yes, on one hand I didn't want to put it down and on the other I didn't want it to end because I knew it was the last he would write.

Any additional comments?

If you are a Christopher Hitchens fan then you will appreciate this book. It shows a side of him that most of us never got to see. RIP Christopher... You are missed.

Miss Christopher Hitchens

Considering the subject matter of this book, it had typical Christopher Hitchens humor. Enjoyed it being raw in his feelings and descriptions of what he went through.

Pure clarity on the topic of death.

Death is never a good thing, but Hitchens once again has spurred my motivation. Live life, and live it well is a good motto. But I don't think you'd ever reach the verve of Hitchens. I've never known of anyone so sure that they are correct, and that their path is the right one. While I didn't always agree with his points, I was never as sure about my opinion as he seemed to be about his.

As I listened on, while I already knew the ending, I could not help but think that Hitchens was too smart, too creative, and too boisterous to not find a way to change the course of this inevitable ending. He gave insight into the plight of cancer patients, and intimate thoughts of the terminally ill. Insights that I think you'd only receive from a dear loved one going through the same illness and treatments. In all of his writing, the one thing I took was a severe pride in humanity. We are but clever animals, and look what we have accomplished. And all of us do what we do while knowing this fate awaits us. What courage it takes to live life like we're not dying. He wrote this with that same unending pride and thoughtfulness that he chastised religious believers for forsaking. Spending life on bended knee for an idea that has been improved upon was not for Hitchens.

Dying while pretending he wasn't going to die was not his way either. He took all of the pain of death, and focused on it. He had to full appreciate what he was going through as he wrote about it. That takes some serious intestinal fortitude, and that was the way of Hitchens.

While my rambling review is not great, I highly recommend this book.

A MUST! Heartbreaking & beautiful.

I was expecting this to be an expose into the philosophy of mortality in general. I was not expecting this to be a very personal and intimate tale of Christopher's "battle" with cancer. wow! this was something very simple honest and in its way quite beautiful. I am so glad to have stumbled across this true gem.