Mortality
(Book - Regular Print)

In this book, the author of Hitch-22 describes his losing battle with esophageal cancer while writing columns for Vanity Fair on politics and culture and also describing his personal and philosophical view of life and death. On June 8, 2010, while on a book tour, the author was stricken in his New York hotel room with excruciating pain in his chest and thorax. Over the next eighteen months, until his death in Houston, Texas on December 15, 2011, he wrote constantly and brilliantly on politics and culture. Throughout the course of his ordeal battling esophageal cancer, he adamantly and bravely refused the solace of religion, preferring to confront death with both eyes open. In a riveting account of his affliction, he describes the torments of illness, discusses its taboos, and explores how disease transforms experience and changes our relationship to the world around us. By turns personal and philosophical, he embraces the full panoply of human emotions.