An afterword to the life of Christopher Hitchens

Carol Blue, Christopher Hitchens' widow, talks about his legacy, his illness and life without him.

Listen here. (abc.net.au)

What Sort of People are the Christopher Hitchens Fan Club?

By Peter Hitchens

I can’t really claim that I never notice the extraordinarily spiteful attacks on me which come from one particular quarter. They're almost impossible to miss. Some of them are on Twitter. Others arrive here directly. Others surface in various places on the Internet. Those responsible claim to be admirers of my late brother, Christopher.

Read more (hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk)

Carol Blue on Q

The iconoclast Christopher Hitchens loved life and delighted in "doing and thinking and writing all the things that he had always done, up until the very end," says his widow, Carol Blue.
Listen here (cbc.ca)

and

This year’s LENNONONO GRANT FOR PEACE recipients are:

RACHEL CORRIE, JOHN PERKINS, CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS, PUSSY RIOT plus one more

http://imaginepeace.com/archives/18529

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/09/20/christopher-hitchens-pussy-riot-peace-prize-john-lennon_n_1899208.html

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.)

An interview with Carol Blue

Amazon: Mortality shows us a different side of Christopher Hitchens. How was he different in private from the public persona that so many of us saw?

There was a gentle side of Christopher that wasn’t necessarily on display in his public appearances. If you were to watch every YouTube video of Christopher speaking and debating, it wouldn’t convey what he was like in private...

Read more http://www.omnivoracious.com/2012/09/on-mortality-an-interview-with-christopher-hitchens-widow-carol-blue.html

Carol Blue on The Leonard Lopate Show

Carol Blue, the widow of Christopher Hitchens, discusses his last book, Mortality, a collection of his series of award-winning columns for Vanity Fair, written over the last year of his life.



http://www.wnyc.org/shows/lopate/2012/sep/07/christopher-hitchens-mortality/

Carol Blue on "CBS This Morning"

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505263_162-57508197/christopher-hitchens-widow-on-his-death-god-never-came-up/

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

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/