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Mortality

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Readers of his 2007 atheist classic, “God Is Not Great,” will get the frisky “convert” bit; more than a few of the pages in “Mortality” are devoted — as it were — to a final, defiant and well-­reasoned defense of his non-God-fearingness. Hitchens’s powerful voice compels us to consider carefully the small measures by which we live every day and to cherish them.

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. As his illness progressed, Hitchens found that he needed that genuine support and freedom more than anything. Oh, Islam," he replies, in a tone both earnest and edged with self-parody, upping his English accent. He never cancelled any engagements for the fear of letting people down and pursued to spread the truth even when a metastasised, “blind, emotionless alien” was eating him up from within. The melancholy irony of 'Mortality' is that it gave our best essayist - I can't think of someone who comes even close - the chance to grapple with the most intractable subject, to wrestle with the angel of death in a battle we will all have to lose at one time or another.Of course my book hit the bestseller list on the day that I received the grimmest of news bulletins, and for that matter the last flight I took as a healthy-feeling person (to a fine, big audience at the Chicago Book Fair) was the one that made me a million-miler on United Airlines, with a lifetime of free upgrades to look forward to. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick," Sontag wrote in Illness as Metaphor . He was fearless in the field and relentless in his defense of the defenseless with that mightiest of swords--his pen. The alien was burrowing into me even as I wrote the jaunty words about my own prematurely announced death.

He also knew that he needed genuine support, not empty promises that encouraged him to believe that he could beat his disease or that this was somehow a positive thing. Its ironies of frozen narrative lend to its subjects an apparent unawareness that they will change or die. As expected, and with the most admirable fluidity of language, he highlights the absurdity in opposing arguments with charm and a contextual tour of historical thought.As he dealt with fatigue and nausea, with the anger, disgust and frustration that must accompany what he knew was a death sentence, Hitch poured it all into words as painfully honest as they were hilarious. This is a distinctly bizarre way of “living”—lawyers in the morning and doctors in the afternoon—and means that one has to exist even more than usual in a double frame of mind. A challenging author that through a very moving narrative of his relationship with cancer, invites us to think of life as something more than that which we usually do. Christopher Hitchens devoted his life to the pursuit of knowledge and self-expression and he was determined to do so throughout his illness as well. Under his confident reasoning, like a great philosopher of our modern time, you realise the absurdity of this cancer-getting claim.

Despite the book’s focus on his own death, Hitchens, as a staunch atheist, never fails to educate and entertain us about the Faith community’s contradictions. As against that, the humor is a touch feeble and repetitive, there seems to be almost no talk of sex, and the cuisine is the worst of any destination I have ever visited. But, as I knew before I became ill, there are some people for whom this explanation is unsatisfying.

In the most beautiful apposition of two of the simplest words in our language: the freedom of speech. 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. vivid, heart-wrenching and haunting - messages in a bottle tossed from the deck of a sinking ship as its captain, reeling in agony and fighting through the fog of morphine, struggles to keep his engines going . Death is something that affects every living being in the world, but we prefer to avoid this topic as much as we can.

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