Carol Blue On Mourning And 'Mortality'

Talk of the Nation.
Carol Blue, Hitchens' wife of 20 years, interviewed on NPR by Neal Conan.

Listen here. (30 min.)

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

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

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

Trial of the Will

Vanity Fair | January 2012
By Christopher Hitchens

When it came to it, and old Kingsley suffered from a demoralizing and disorienting fall, he did take to his bed and eventually turned his face to the wall. It wasn’t all reclining and waiting for hospital room service after that—“Kill me, you fucking fool!” he once alarmingly exclaimed to his son Philip—but essentially he waited passively for the end. It duly came, without much fuss and with no charge.
Read more.

A Voice, Still Vibrant, Reflects on Mortality

Hitchens, journalist Matthew Chapman, Dawkins, Carol Blue

By Charles McGrath / The New York Times

HOUSTON — Christopher Hitchens, probably the country’s most famous unbeliever, received the Freethinker of the Year Award at the annual convention of the Atheist Alliance of America here on Saturday. Mr. Hitchens was flattered by the honor, he said a few days beforehand, but also a little abashed.

Read More
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/10/books/christopher-hitchens-on-writing-mortality-and-cancer.html?ref=books

Hitchens makes first public appearance in months

By Geoff Berg

"Hitchens’ speech did not disappoint. He talked about his illness and noted that over the last year, he’d been coming to Houston regularly for treatment, presumably at MD Anderson Cancer Center. He was emphatic that though his “time” is rapidly approaching, he wouldn’t stop doing his best to shed light on the fraudulent claims made by religion, a line that brought the crowd to its feet."

Read More:
http://blog.chron.com/partisangridlock/2011/10/christopher-hitchens-makes-first-public-appearance-in-months/

Outspoken and outrageous: Christopher Hitchens

(CBS News) Steve Kroft profiles Vanity Fair columnist, author and public intellectual Christopher Hitchens, for whom nothing is off-limits when making his wry and often outrageous observations, including the cancer he is suffering from.

For main segment and web extras:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/03/06/60minutes/main20038931.shtml?tag=contentMain;cbsCarousel

Hitchens feared cancer could stop his writing

The interview will be broadcasted on "60 Minutes" Sunday, March 6 at 7 p.m. ET/PT. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/03/04/60minutes/main20038931.shtml

Christopher Hitchens takes on new drug regime in hope of cancer cure

By Ephraim Hardcastle

"Buoyed by a visit by his friend, playwright Sir Tom Stoppard – and a note of encouragement from ex-President George W Bush whom he’s often mocked..

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1350588/Christopher-Hitchens-takes-new-drug-regime-hope-cancer-cure.html#ixzz1C6s9LSgp

BBC Newsnight Special: Christopher Hitchens

CH interviewed in his home in Washington D.C by Jeremy Paxman. Broadcasted on Nov 29, 2010.





Play Full Interview.

BBC Newsnight: Christopher Hitchens (Preview)

Jeremy Paxman interviews Christopher Hitchens in Washington D.C. Full interview on BBC2, Nov 29, 7.30pm. 

Christopher Hitchens on ABC1 Lateline. Part One

CH talks to Tony Jones about living with cancer and not seeing any valid reason to change his beliefs close to death.



Part one, 2 videos.

Miss Manners And the Big C

By Christopher Hitchens

Ever since I was felled in mid-book tour this summer, I have adored and seized all chances to play catch-up and to keep as many engagements as I can. Debating and lecturing are part of the breath of life to me, and I take deep drafts whenever and wherever possible.
Read article (Vanity Fair, December 2010)

Tumortown

By Christopher Hitchens

Peach pits, open chakras, macrobiotic diets: cancer patients get more unsolicited advice than they could possibly follow. Cutting-edge medicine seems to offer limitless options, too—until the author runs smack into the lethal idiocy of the godly opponents of stem-cell research.

Read more (Vanity Fair, November 2010)

Unanswerable Prayers

What’s an atheist to think when thousands of believers (including prominent rabbis and priests) are praying for his survival and salvation—while others believe his cancer was divinely inspired, and hope that he burns in hell? Related: The first in the series, “Topic of Cancer,” by Christopher Hitchens.

Continue reading. (Vanity Fair)

Christopher Hitchens has been diagnosed with esophageal cancer.

Christopher's statement "I have been advised by my physician that I must undergo a course of chemotherapy on my esophagus. This advice seems persuasive to me. I regret having had to cancel so many engagements at such short notice". http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/30/christopher-hitchens-canc_n_631429.html Esophageal cancer (Wikipedia)

clevelandclinicmeded.com

cancer.gov/esophageal