Mortality

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Dr Kenneth Rooney is lecturer in medieval and renaissance literature in the School of English, University College Cork, Ireland. Please only post requests for suggestions, not unsolicited recommendations or “should I read this book or that book” type posts.

The country has a language of its own—a lingua franca that manages to be both dull and difficult and that contains names like ondansetron, for anti-​nausea medication—as well as some unsettling gestures that require a bit of getting used to. In this beautifully written book of essays, Dr Oliver Sacks reflects with gratitude on his long, adventurous life, following a diagnosis of terminal cancer. That’s how I discovered that my cancer had spread to my lymph nodes, and that one of these deformed beauties—located on my right clavicle, or collarbone—was big enough to be seen and felt. 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. Even though the concept of mortality was difficult to grasp, the reality of death became part of daily life as Hitchens suffered through the pain of his disease and extensive cancer treatments.It’s only when we are confronted with something truly life-altering — like a terminal diagnosis — that we genuinely begin to consider the fleeting nature of our lives. 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. Some of his friends tried to stay relentlessly positive; they didn’t know what to say, so they tried to tell him motivational stories about people who had beaten cancer. Mortality is the most meditative collection of writing Hitchens has ever produced - 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. Pat Archbold, at the National Catholic Register, and Deacon Greg Kandra were among the Roman Catholics who thought me a worthy object of prayer.

Betrand Russell and Voltaire, by contrast, remained spry until the end, as many psychopathic criminals and tyrants have also done.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. This small volume contains an admirably terse chapter informing fundamentalists that the argument about evolution is over, mainly because there is no argument.

Instead of trying to encourage people to be “strong,” try to support them where they are and give the freedom to be tired and weak. An Iranian friend has asked for a prayer to be said for me at the grave of Omar Khayyam, supreme poet of Persian freethinkers. Full of conversations with brain surgeons, psychologists, hospice workers and poets, this is a deeply personal book about how we can make peace with dying. Like virtually everything he wrote over his long, distinguished career, diamond-hard and brilliant .Although people often forget to attribute it to Nietzsche, this phrase has become inexorably intertwined in popular culture and is often depicted in popular songs, poems, and wearable art. A different secular problem also occurs to me: What if I pulled through and the pious faction contentedly claimed that their prayers had been answered?

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? If you know and love Christopher Hitchens work and outlook on life, you have to read this, his final contribution to the cause of common sense and reason. The night of the terrible morning, I was supposed to go on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and then appear at a sold-out event at the 92nd Street Y, on the Upper East Side, in conversation with Salman Rushdie.

It took strenuous effort for me to cross the room of my New York hotel and summon the emergency services. One of these notes reads: "If I convert it's because it's better a believer dies than that an atheist does.