If You are Thinking of Dying Soon

++Andrew Sullivan highlighted the new book by the late Christopher Hitchens that chronicled his last days with cancer. Although the pub date was a few days off, I went out and got it at Barnes and Noble. "Mortality" appeared in large swatches in Vanity Fair drink the period of Hitchens illness. At the time, the public issue was whether Hitchens would make a deathbed confession and assert a newfound faith in God--something he never did and warned friends not to believe it if someone said it happened.

++Hitchens was on a book tour for his memoir Hitch-22 when he was stricken with what he thought was a heart attack on June 8,2010 only to be told it was cancer. He wrote he suddenly found himself being deported " from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady." Over 18 months before his death on December 15,2011, he wrote constantly about all matters of politics and culture. 

++Hitchens didn't flinch in describing the ordeal of esophageal cancer, its torments and its impact of how he not only related to others but his own body. He talks about how the late Sidney Hook, another atheist struggled with his own illness and wanted the end to come because of the draining effect of new medical innovations that prolonged his life. Hitchens didn't quite feel the same way as he sought various experimental therapies and was attracted to the innovations of gene therapy. None of them would be developed in time for use in Hitchens' case. But his struggle also demonstrated his ceaseless curiosity and his keen interest in forms of human progress.

++This small (104 page) book published by 12 ($22.99--cheaper on Amazon) is a fitting last testimony by a prolific author.