A Brief Review of Christopher Hitchens Mortality

A Brief Review of Christopher Hitchens' 'Mortality' I have more than once in my time woken up feeling like death. But nothing had prepared me for the early morning in June when I came to consciousness feeling as if I were actually shackled to my own corpse. -Christopher Hitchens Mortality, Page 1.       Christopher Hitchens has certainly lived up to his reputation in his last work  Mortality; one which, with the accommodation of his hallmark magnificent prose and style, hauntingly details his last two living years. Final years that had been, both in terms of publicity and fame, the most successful in his lifetime. It was during his book tour of his massively popular memoir,  Hitch-22,  that he was, as it were,  overcome one morning by symptoms which ultimately were due to late-stage esophageal cancer. Late stage it indeed was. He would later be diagnosed with Stage-4 esophageal cancer. The thing to note about Stage-4, he would later note with a grin, is that there is no Stage-5; this had successfully put him in the ranks of, as he put it, a cancer elite. I rather look down on people with lesser cancers was the sentiment proposed during a late 2011 interview on CBS 60 Minutes. A charmed lifetime of living, as he would call it, the Bohemian lifestyle; namely, long nights moving slowly and confidently from glass to glass of scotch which were unquestionably supplemented by countless cigarettes, had certainly brought forth his deadly prognosis; but even in the face of death Hitch remained the figure that many of us had come to admire: a man confident, terrifyingly intelligent, unfailingly skeptical, and lovingly steeped in the high arts. To say that  Mortality  is his  magnum opus  would be to discredit his earlier works and indeed to succumb to perhaps a pitying, premature judgment. What I would say, however, is that this catalogue of his process of death, or, as he would say, living dyingly; is certainly the most honest and introspectively insightful work of the man. It would seem pathetic of me to say that I am glad that this book was his last but I cannot see myself wholly disagreeing with this for I cannot picture a more acute distillation of the ironies and complexities of Americas biggest journalistic loss of 2011.