Mortality reviews 2

Mail Online
By John Preston

The Christopher Hitchens who stares out of the cover of this book is a very different-looking figure to the one who appeared on all his other books. He’s thinner for a start - much thinner. And so is his hair. The once-thick brown mop has gone and in its place is a light dusting of frizz Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-2195770/MORTALITY-BY-CHRISTOPHER-HITCHENS.html#ixzz257VGbDFf

Los Angeles Times
Review: Christopher Hitchens stays contrarian in 'Mortality'
By David L. Ulin

For all that literature is an art of self-exposure, writers tend to back away from impending death. The shelf of firsthand looks at what Janet Hobhouse called "this dying business" is a short one — http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-ca-christopher-hitchens-20120902,0,6090416.story

The Miami Herald
Hitch’s losing battle
By Ariel Gonzalez

 By all means, let us speak ill of the dead. Christopher Hitchens would have it no other way. He wore out soles from dancing on graves. Among the famously departed he dissed were Princess Diana (“a simpering Bambi narcissist”), Mother Teresa (“a thieving, fanatical Albanian dwarf”), and Ronald Reagan (“an obvious phony and loon”).
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/08/31/2976306/hitchs-losing-battle.html#storylink=cpy

The Huffington Post
The Imperfect Pleasure of Reading Christopher Hitchens
By Wayne K. Spear

The author known chiefly from his 1949 work Nineteen Eighty-Four was by turns a police officer, tramp, gardener and soldier, as well as a broadcaster -- his depiction of the Ministry of Truth drawing upon the BBC building in which he broadcast a literary radio program.
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/wayne-k-spear/christopher-hitchens_b_1836656.html

Plus Excerpt via Publishers Weekly
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/book-news/tip-sheet/article/53774-excerpt--mortality-by-christopher-hitchens.html

Death, Explained

Christopher Hitchens’ Mortality: A rare honest book about death.
By Katie Roiphe

Before being diagnosed with esophageal cancer, Christopher Hitchens wrote in his memoir, Hitch-22, “I want to stare death in the eye.”

This seems, of course, an impossible blustery task, but in his last book, Mortality he comes astonishingly close to pulling it off.


Read more http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/roiphe/2012/08/christopher_hitchens_mortality_an_honest_book_about_death_.html

The PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for Art of the Essay

2012 Winner: Arguably

"Arguably is a book of essays astonishingly wide-ranging and provocative, taking on everything from Middle Eastern politics to Thomas Jefferson and Prince Charles, from Lolita and Ezra Pound to Hitler, Saul Bellow and Hugo Boss."

Read more http://www.pen.org/page.php/prmID/2240

Martin Amis: Still talking to Hitch

1977

Slate
Author Martin Amis on coping with the loss of his best friend Christopher Hitchens.

When Christopher Hitchens died in December, Martin Amis lost his best friend. The British author says his immediate desolation gave way to a much greater love of life, something Amis believes Hitchens had in spades and bequeathed to him when he passed away.

Watch video here.

Mortality reviews

The Guardian

In these final essays, Hitchens examines his own disbelief that writing – indistinguishable to him from living – is about to end. "Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Centre rise again? To read – if not indeed to write – the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger?" http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/aug/26/mortality-christopher-hitchens-review

Daily Mail Online

There has been a recent spate of books written by men suffering from terminal cancer. Mortality by Christopher Hitchens is, by my reckoning, the third this year, the others being When I Die by the New Labour PR Philip Gould, and Until Further Notice, I Am Alive by the art critic Tom Lubbock.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-2193609/MORTALITY-Christopher-Hitchens-Review-new-book-written-great-debater.html#ixzz24f8isF2G

WHITE WALLS / BLACK INK

No one who might have glanced over back in December at a post on my now defunct political blog, Orwell’s Hanky, about the death of Christopher Hitchens, will labor through this review with any misapprehensions regarding objectivity. I’ve grown to become very comfortable in the position that no review (or even, honestly, rather much journalism of any sort) can or should reach for objectivity. http://wwbi.wordpress.com/2012/07/16/christopher-hitchenss-mortality/

Mortality

Amazon Book Description:

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.

http://www.amazon.com/
http://www.amazon.co.uk/

Christopher Hitchens: an impossible act to follow

The Telegraph
By Carol Blue

Onstage, my husband was an impossible act to follow. If you ever saw him at the podium, you may not share Richard Dawkins’s assessment that “he was the greatest orator of our time”, but you will know what I mean – or at least you won’t think, “She would say that, she’s his wife.” Offstage, my husband was an impossible act to follow.

Read more http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/9480797/Christopher-Hitchens-an-impossible-act-to-follow.html

The “unpublished jottings” of Christopher Hitchens

By Christopher Hitchens and David Plotz

"Remember, you too are mortal"—hit me at the top of my form and just as things were beginning to plateau. My two assets my pen and my voice—and it had to be the esophagus. All along, while burning the candle at both ends, I'd been "straying into the arena of the unwell" and now "a vulgar little tumor" was evident. http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/fighting_words/2012/08/christopher_hitchens_mortality_the_unpublished_jottings_of_the_late_great_writer_and_thinker_.html

'I am not fighting or battling cancer - it is fighting me'

Daily Mail Online

As he faced death from cancer, author and journalist Christopher Hitchens kept his wry sense of humour to the very end, it emerged today.
He used a hospital food tray as a desk for his computer to record his last thoughts about the illness which claimed his life at 62.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2190200/I-fighting-battling-cancer--fighting-Last-words-author-Christopher-Hitchens-faced-death.html