During the American book tour for his memoir, Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens collapsed in his hotel room with excruciating pain in his chest. Yet we also know that this gift is given to us for a limited period – we grow up, we grow older and eventually, we die. Hitchens, famously an atheist, visited the question of whether he should take Pascal's wager and bet on God, concluding in the negative even as good God-fearing citizens filled his inbox with assurances that God was punishing him for his blasphemies with throat cancer. Oh, Islam," he replies, in a tone both earnest and edged with self-parody, upping his English accent.

The first seven chapters are, like virtually everything [Hitchens] wrote over his long, distinguished career, diamond-hard and brilliant. The critical response to Mortality was largely positive with friends and admirers of Hitchens praising both his character in confronting his death and the way that this was transferred onto the page. A different secular problem also occurs to me: What if I pulled through and the pious faction contentedly claimed that their prayers had been answered? And most of these are just as “religious” as the chap who wants me to be tortured in the here and now—which I will be even if I eventually recover—and then tortured forever into the bargain if I don’t recover or, presumably and ultimately, even if I do.

More, it is an instigatory experience: it compels you to get involved more deeply with the world around and inside you. Because he contracted cancer of the oesophagus, he was also cursed with the knowledge that his illness would inflict the most personal insult: taking his voice before it took the rest of him. Now in his sixties, he is finding that his friends are similarly preoccupied - death has become his contemporaries’ every third thought. He makes mordant play with the bloggers who posted remarks about how God was punishing his atheism by removing the voice with which he blasphemed. He would stay up late drinking and talking, moving with judicious and delicious care from the large questions of the day to the small sweet business of invective, anecdotes and gossip.

A loss to the literary world, and an even bigger loss in the pursuit of fact over fiction, and the end of corruption and greed. The alien was burrowing into me even as I wrote the jaunty words about my own prematurely announced death. An eighth and final chapter consists…of unfinished "fragmentary jottings" that he wrote in his terminal days in the critical-care unit of the M.But nothing prepared me for the early morning in June when I came to consciousness feeling as if I were actually shackled to my own corpse. He was scared of facing a slow, drawn out death and he knew that his illness would never end in him growing stronger.

He demystifies the malady of cancer in general; he wasn’t battling cancer, the dignifying verb that is normally associated with it. So, rather than being wishy-washy and abandoning beliefs as it suited him, Hitchens chose to stick to his guns.One thing he noticed was that the subject of death makes people awkward because many people prefer to avoid thinking about it. The book's power lies in its simplicity, in its straightforward, intelligent documenting, its startling refusal of showiness or melodrama or grandeur. The country has a language of its own—a lingua franca that manages to be both dull and difficult and that contains names like ondansetron, for anti-nausea medication—as well as some unsettling gestures that require a bit of getting used to. He felt the same way about well-intentioned friends who used toxic positivity to encourage him to “keep fighting. In a glowing review of Mortality in The New York Times, Christopher Buckley described Hitchens' seven essays as "diamond-hard and brilliant" and "word-perfect.

Rabbi David Wolpe, author of Why Faith Matters and the leader of a major congregation in Los Angeles, said the same. On June 8, 2010, several days after the memoir was published, he awoke in his New York hotel room “feeling as if I were actually shackled to my own corpse. Declan is dying of AIDS, and Dora, her daughter Lily and granddaughter Helen, estranged for years, have come together in Dora’s house by the sea to nurse him.I managed to pull off both gigs without anyone noticing anything amiss, though I did vomit two times, with an extraordinary combination of accuracy, neatness, violence, and profusion, just before each show. You’ll explore what it feels like to be confronted with one’s mortality, how to handle severe pain and how cancer affects the body and mind.