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Christopher Hitchens - Mortality - Unabridged
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Artist...............: Christopher Hitchens
Album................: Mortality - Unabridged
Genre................: Audiobook
Source...............: CD
Year.................: 2012
Codec................: LAME 3.92
Version..............: MPEG 1 Layer III
Quality..............: , (avg. bitrate: 96kbps)
Channels.............: Stereo / 44100 hz
Tags.................: ID3 v1.1, ID3 v2.3 
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/mortality-christopher-hitchens/1108616430
Playing Time.........: 02:11:00
Total Size...........: 90.63 MB


On June 8, 2010, while on a book tour for his bestselling memoir, Hitch-22, 
Christopher Hitchens was stricken in his New York hotel room with 
excruciating pain in his chest and thorax. As he would later write in the first 
of a series of award-winning columns for Vanity Fair, he suddenly found 
himself being deported "from the country of the well across the stark frontier 
that marks off the land of malady." Over the next eighteen months, until his 
death in Houston on December 15, 2011, he wrote constantly and brilliantly 
on politics and culture, astonishing readers with his capacity for superior work 
even in extremis.

The New York Times Book Review
The first seven chapters are, like virtually everything [Hitchens] wrote over 
his long, distinguished career, diamond-hard and brilliant. An eighth and final 
chapter consistsàof unfinished "fragmentary jottings" that he wrote in his 
terminal days in the critical-care unit of the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in 
Houston. They're vivid, heart-wrenching and hauntingùmessages 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 goingà
Being in Christopher's company was rarely sobering, but always exhilarating. 
It is, however, sobering and grief-inducing to read this brave and harrowing 
account of his "year of living dyingly" in the grip of the alien that succeeded 
where none of his debate opponents had in bringing him down.
ùChristopher Buckley

Publishers Weekly
Diagnosed with the esophageal cancer to which he eventually succumbed in 
December 2011, cultural critic Hitchens found himself a finalist in the race of 
life, and in his typically unflinching and bold manner, he candidly shares his 
thoughts about his suffering, the etiquette of illness and wellness, and 
religion in this stark and powerful memoir. Commenting on the persistent 
metaphor of battle that doctors and friends use to describe his life with 
cancer (most of this book was published in Vanity Fair), Hitchens mightily 
challenges this image, for ôwhen you sit in a room... and kindly people bring a 
huge transparent bag of poison and plug it into your arm, and you either 
read or donÆt read a book while the venom sack gradually empties itself into 
your system, the image of the ardent soldier is the very last one that will 
occur to you.ö As a result of his various treatments, Hitchens begins to lose 
his voice, which, given his life as public gadfly through writing and speeches, 
devastates him. ôWhat do I hope for? If not a cure, then a remission. And 
what do I want back? In the most beautiful apposition of two of the simplest 
words in our language: the freedom of speech.ö HitchensÆs powerful voice 
compels us to consider carefully the small measures by which we live every 
day and to cherish them.

Product Details
ISBN-13: 9781455502752
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Publication date: 9/4/2012
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