What zeal this man had to eviscerate the conceits of the powerful, whether their authority derived from wealth, the state, or a claim to the ear of the divine. An eighth and final chapter consists…of unfinished "fragmentary jottings" that he wrote in his terminal days in the critical-care unit of the M. By a similar twist, those who want me to burn in hell are also mocking those kind religious folk who do not find me unsalvageably evil. He’s going to writhe in agony and pain and wither away to nothing and then die a horrible agonizing death, and THEN comes the real fun, when he’s sent to HELLFIRE forever to be tortured and set afire. But irony is my business and I just can’t see any ironies here: Would it be less poignant to get cancer on the day that my memoirs were remaindered as a box-office turkey, or that I was bounced from a coach-class flight and left on the tarmac?

Declan is dying of AIDS, and Dora, her daughter Lily and granddaughter Helen, estranged for years, have come together in Dora’s house by the sea to nurse him. Dr Kenneth Rooney is lecturer in medieval and renaissance literature in the School of English, University College Cork, Ireland.If working at an office location and you are not "logged in", simply close and relaunch your preferred browser. All along, while burning the candle at both ends, I’d been ‘straying into the arena of the unwell’ and now ‘a vulgar little tumor’ was evident. Mortality is at once an unsparingly honest account of the ravages of his disease, an examination of cancer etiquette, and the coda to a lifetime of fierce debate and peerless prose.

I've read most of Hitchens books, and following his career from the mid nineties, and I love his writing style. Under his confident reasoning, like a great philosopher of our modern time, you realise the absurdity of this cancer-getting claim. It’s even in obituaries for cancer losers, as if one might reasonably say of someone that they died after a long and brave struggle with mortality. The chest hair that was once the toast of two continents hasn’t yet wilted, but so much of it was shaved off for various hospital incisions that it’s a rather patchy affair. In a glowing review of Mortality in The New York Times, Christopher Buckley described Hitchens' seven essays as "diamond-hard and brilliant" and "word-perfect.Pastor Wilson responded that when he heard the news he prayed for three things: that I would fight off the disease, that I would make myself right with eternity, and that the process would bring the two of us back into contact. Even though we know we’ll all die someday, it’s easier to avoid thinking about it until we absolutely have to. He was fearless in the field and relentless in his defense of the defenseless with that mightiest of swords--his pen. Instead of scrolling through your social media news feed, this is a much better way to spend your spare time in my opinion.