Mortality reviews 3

The Wall Street Journal
A Wit Rages Before the Abyss
By Henry Allen

The proof that there is no afterlife is that Christopher Hitchens is not sending us columns, essays, books, perversities, aperçus and polemics from it. The closest we have so far is the 104 pages of "Mortality." He wrote them while knowing that he would die soon of esophageal cancer, which he did last Dec. 15, at the age of 62. Not a word from him since. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444812704577605110400199868.html

The Guardian
Mortality by Christopher Hitchens – review
By Colm Tóibín

He was the best company in the whole world; he had read widely and because he was an industrious man and filled with curiosity, he hoped to read much more. 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.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/aug/31/mortality-christopher-hitchens-review

The New York Times/Sunday Book Review
Staying power
By Christopher Buckley

Christopher Hitchens began his memoir, “Hitch-22,” on a note of grim amusement at finding himself described in a British National Portrait Gallery publication as “the late Christopher Hitchens.” He wrote, “So there it is in cold print, the plain unadorned phrase that will one day become unarguably true.” http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/02/books/review/mortality-by-christopher-hitchens.html

Big Think
Book Of The Month
By Nick Clairmont

We are pleased but saddened to introduce our third book of the month: Mortality by Christopher Hitchens. The posthumous book represents the last work of the great journalist, polemicist, and thinker.      http://bigthink.com/book-of-the-month/book-of-the-month-mortality-by-christopher-hitchens

BOOKFORUM
The Last Word
By Jeff Sharlet

Mortality, a posthumous collection of Christopher Hitchens’s short essays on living with terminal esophageal cancer—“a distinctly bizarre way of ‘living,’” he emphasizes, “lawyers in the morning and doctors in the afternoon”—is an odd little book, neither fully a cancer memoir nor a meditation on the meanings we attribute to the disease.
http://bookforum.com/inprint/019_03/10034

Book Review Podcast: Mortality

Arts Beat/The New York Times
By John Williams

This week in the New York Times Book Review, Christopher Buckley reviews “Mortality” by Christopher Hitchens, a slender book that collects the essays Mr. Hitchens wrote after being stricken with esophageal cancer.

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/31/book-review-podcast-christopher-hitchenss-mortality/

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

Inside the Orgone Box

The New York Times - Sunday Book Review

Christopher Hitchens reviews

ADVENTURES IN THE ORGASMATRON
How the Sexual Revolution Came to America
By Christopher Turner

In the classic confessional memoir “The God That Failed,” Arthur Koestler describes some of the characters who made up the constituency of his Communist Party group in Berlin in the early 1930s: “Among other members of our cell, I remember Dr. Wilhelm Reich. He . . . had just published a book called ‘The Function of the Orgasm,’ in which he had expounded the theory that the sexual frustration of the proletariat caused a thwarting of its political consciousness; only through a full, uninhibited release of the sexual urge could the working class realize its revolutionary potentialities and historic mission; the whole thing was less cockeyed than it sounds.”

Read More

Knock-down brilliance

Arguably by Christopher Hitchens - The Independent
Review by Fred Inglis

Arguably? Arguably? Christopher Hitchens uses the phrase often enough of course, but strictly as Humpty Dumpty does, when Alice tells him she doesn't know what he means. Humpty Dumpty smiles contemptuously. "Of course you don't – till I tell you. I meant, 'there's a nice knockdown argument for you'." "Till I tell you": that's the point.

Read more
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/arguably-by-christopher-hitchens-2359192.html

Arguably by Christopher Hitchens: review

The Telegraph | Christopher Hitchens’s provocative journalism is greater than the sum of its parts, argues Nicholas Shakespeare as he reviews Arguably.

Every generation tends to look silly to the one after; those beehive hairdos, those chain smokers. Reacting to previous experience, we don’t make progress, necessarily. Vicars have randy daughters and randy daughters give birth to boys who in turn become vicars.

More: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/8765444/Arguably-by-Christopher-Hitchens-review.html

Man of His Words

The New York Times | Sunday Book Review

"Anyone who occasionally opens one of our more serious periodicals has learned that the byline of Christopher Hitchens is an opportunity to be delighted or maddened — possibly both — but in any case not to be missed. He is our intellectual omnivore, exhilarating and infuriating, if not in equal parts at least with equal wit."

Don't miss the Book Review Podcast (Bill Keller on the career of Christopher Hitchens). 

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/books/review/arguably-essays-by-christopher-hitchens-book-review.html

There's just one Hitch

The Australian Reviews Arguably.

LAST year, just before he was diagnosed with advanced oesophageal cancer, Christopher Hitchens published the unexpectedly moving memoir Hitch-22.

 "I soon enough realised when young," he revealed in that book, "that I did not have the true 'stuff' for [writing] fiction and poetry. And I was very fortunate indeed to have, as contemporaries, several practitioners of those arts who made it obvious to me, without unduly rubbing in the point, that I would be wasting my time if I tried."

 As a journalist, Hitchens has done everything with his time except waste it. He has made himself the key writer of the post-9/11 age. No novelist or poet has registered the texture of the past decade as pungently as Hitchens has in the essay form.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/arts-arc/theres-just-one-hitch/story-e6frg8nf-1226126501899