Media Reviews
If Hitchens didn't exist, we wouldn't be able to invent him. --Ian McEwan
The business and pleasure sides of Mr. Hitchens's personality can made him seem, whether you agree with him or not, among the most purely alive people on the planet. --Dwight Garner, New York Times
Christopher Hitchens, the polemical polymath, is to modern American discourse what Lenny Bruce was to comedy. He changed the game, and in so doing forced us to examine our core beliefs. --Timothy Egan, New York Times
Christopher Hitchens is the greatest living essayist in the English Language. --Christopher Bukcley
As contemptuous, digressive, righteous, and riotously funny as the rest of the author's incessant output, this memoir is an effective coming-of-age story, regardless of what one may think of the resulting adult . . . Hitchens paints a credible and even affecting self-portrait. -- The New Yorker on Hitch-22
Being able to shape-change, shed skins, sit on the hillside overlooking suburbia like a coyote, Hitchens represents a dying breed of public intellectual whose voice matters precisely because it can't be easily pigeonholed or ignored. --Douglas Brinkley, Los Angeles Times
Few writers can match Hitchens's cerebral pyrotechnics. Fewer still can emulate his punch as an intellectual character assassin. It is hard not to admire the sheer virtuosity of his prose...With Hitchens one simply goes along for the ride. The destination hardly matters. --Ed Luce, Financial Times
Hitch-22 is among the loveliest paeans to the dearness of one's friends . . . I've ever read. The business and pleasure sides of Mr. Hitchens's personality can make him seem, whether you agree with him or not, among the most purely alive people on the planet. -- The New York Times on Hitch-22 Dwight Garner
In this frank, often wickedly funny account, Hitchens traces his evolution as a fiercely independent thinker and enemy of people who are convinced of their absolute certainty ... Revealing and riveting. -- Kirkus on Hitch-22
... a complex portrait of a public intellectual. -- The Wall Street Journal on Hitch-22 Alexandra Alter
Christopher Hitchens may long to be a cogent man of reason, and he can certainly be a pitiless adversary. But he knows there are two sides to any decent match, and it's touching, in HITCH-22, to see how often he'll race to the other side of the court to return his own serve. Which may explain why, though he tries to be difficult, he's so hard to dislike. -- The New York Times Book Review on Hitch-22
Whether he's dodging bullets in Sarajevo, dissing Bill Clinton, (with whom he says he shared a girlfriend at Oxford) or explaining his switch from leftist to Iraq war supporter, this foreign correspondent, pundit, and bon vivant makes for an enlightening companion. Give HITCH 22 an 11 out of 10 for smarts, then double it for entertainment value. -- People Magazine on Hitch-22 Kyle Smith
His unworldly fluency never deserted him, his commitment was passionate, and he never deserted his trade. He was the consummate writer, the brilliant friend. In Walter Pater's famous phrase, he burned 'with this hard gem-like flame.'Right the the end. --Ian McEwan
I have no doubt that Christopher Hitchens will have an afterlife. As one of the most original and provocative writers of his generation, his words will continue to mesmerize, incite, confound, and entertain. --Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, FoxNews.com
Nothing sharpened Christopher Hitchens' mind like Cancer. He wrote the best, most piercing, most clarifying prose of his career as he faced down the specter of his own demise. As he dealt with fatigue and nausea, with the anger, disgust and frustration that must accompany what he knew was a death sentence, Hitch poured it all into words as painfully honest as they were hilarious. --Sharon Waxman, TheWrap.com
Among the many things that made Hitchens unique was his precision of thought and expression. What made him rare were his courage and tenacity. He was fearless in the field and relentless in his defense of the defenseless with that mightiest of swords--his pen. Judging from his final essays, he was also fearless in the fact of death. --Kathleen Parker, The Washington Post
A seeker of truth to the end, and a deservedly legendary witness against the hypocrisy of the ever-sactimonious establishment. 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. --Robert Scheer, TruthDig
Reading and responding to the Hitch is ceaselessly inspiring and seldom less than exhilarating. More, it is an instigatory experience: it compels you to get involved more deeply with the world around and inside you. Reading any worthwhile writer is an act of celebration, a shared reaction to the act of creation. More, it is an exercise in how to write, read, think and live. -- PopMatters.com
For his millions of fans, Hitchens was like a valued dinner guest who never outstayed his welcome. His books, magazine columns, and verbal sparring rounds with the God-fearing best and brightest will stand as hymns to reason, and their smartly barbed rationality will never become tired or trite. Unfortunately, Hitchens has prematurely vacated his place at the table, leaving us wanting more. And here is more. Spare as it is and culled from several of his final Vanity Fair columns, this pamphlet-like tome resurrects great wit and insight from his final year of living dyingly. It would not be classic Hitchens unless he tackled prayer head-on. He does so brilliantly, quoting Ambrose Bierce and following prayer's logic to its circular conclusion. He addresses proper cancer etiquette and the best way to offer advice (don't). With a foreword by Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter and an afterword by Hitchens' widow, Carol Blue, this offers a final course, a dessert, if you will, from the crusty yet tenderhearted atheist to be read and relished.-- Booklist (Starred)
Remarkable....The book's power lies in its simplicity, in its straightforward, intelligent documenting, its startling refusal of showiness or melodrama or grandeur....The great polemicist, essayist, conversationalist, provocateur, arguer, has done something extraordinary in this book. He has created yet another style, another mode, another way of being and thinking and dreaming, on his death bed; he has written in many ways an un-Hitchens-like book, eluding proclamations, resolutions, mastery, wit, at-easeness with opinion, in favor of unnerving directness, of harrowing documentation. He has allowed his dismantled confidence, his undoing to breathe, and to live in the pages, in a way that is startling and new and an achievement unlike his others, different in kind, yet equally ambitious and relentlessly honest. -- Slate Katie Roiphe
Remarkable . . . The book's power lies in its simplicity, in its straightforward, intelligent documenting, its startling refusal of showiness or melodrama or grandeur....The great polemicist, essayist, conversationalist, provocateur, arguer, has done something extraordinary in this book. He has created yet another style, another mode, another way of being and thinking and dreaming, on his death bed; he has written in many ways an un-Hitchens-like book, eluding proclamations, resolutions, mastery, wit, at-easeness with opinion, in favor of unnerving directness, of harrowing documentation. He has allowed his dismantled confidence, his undoing to breathe, and to live in the pages, in a way that is startling and new and an achievement unlike his others, different in kind, yet equally ambitious and relentlessly honest. Katie Roiphe, Slate.com
Like virtually everything he wrote over his long, distinguished career, diamond-hard and brilliant . . .vivid, heart-wrenching and haunting - messages in a bottle tossed from the deck of a sinking ship as its captain, reeling in agony and fighting through the fog of morphine, struggles to keep his engines going . . . a final, defiant, and well-reasoned defense of his non-God-fearingness . . . It is, however, sobering and grief-inducing to read this brave and harrowing account of his 'year of living dyingly' in the grip of an alien that succeeded where none of his debate opponents had in bringing him down. Christopher Buckley, New York Times Book Review
This trenchant, sassy, tragically posthumous little black book earns a proud spot on the end-of-life shelf, along with Julian Barnes' Nothing to Be Frightened Of, Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Joan Wickersham's The Suicide Index, Saul Bellow's Ravelstein, and Philip Roth's Everyman and Exit Ghost, to name just a few. NPR.org
A book driven by his desire to look death squarely in the face and provoked by detractors who were certain he would turn to religion when confronted with it. He did not... [MORTALITY is] full of humility, a humility worthy of kings. Newsday
The melancholy irony of 'Mortality' is that it gave our best essayist - I can't think of someone who comes even close - the chance to grapple with the most intractable subject, to wrestle with the angel of death in a battle we will all have to lose at one time or another.....The voice is gone. The words remain. The New York Daily News
These essays are brave and fitting final words from a writer at the end of his journey. Bookpage
There are no clever pitches to diminish the horror vacui of oblivion. He offers no self-pity or special pleading. The book is tough-minded . . . poignant, but the poignancy is ours, not his. Wall Street Journal
Mortality is a crash course in lived philosophy....bracing. Salon
Stark and powerful... Hitchens's powerful voice compels us to consider carefully the small measures by which we live every day and to cherish them. Publisher's Weekly (Starred)
A jovially combative riposte to anyone who thought that death would silence master controversialist Hitchens. Kirkus Reviews ( Starred )
Unsparingly blunt, rhetorically suave . . . It's rare that someone so powerfully writes of such deep connections between the death of intellectual ability and the decay of the body. Boston Globe
To the end, he produces sentences of startling beauty and precision . . . One of our best is gone, yet Mortality is a powerful and moving final utterance. San Francisco Chronicle
Mortality is not just for Hitchens' fans, but for all.... With almost unimaginable clarity, grace and wit, even for the master wordsmith we had grown used to. We see here a very warm and thoughtful human being. Poignant and deeply personal thoughts on the art of writing and the heartbreak of losing his unmistakable speaking voice during the course of treatment....The furthest thing from grim, Mortality is a gift. Not just from Christopher, but from Carol as well. Do pick it up. Huffington Post
Dealing unflinchingly with bodily ravagement, reflecting on life's beauty and remaining rakish about his ideological foes, Hitchens proves that great writers are truly immortal. People, 4-star review
Mortality, the final book by Christopher Hitchens, the Anglo-American essayist, reporter, devout atheist and all-around intellectual troublemaker, won't be shelved in the travel section. But in a sense that's where it belongs, along with the best of the literary travel writers. Think George Orwell, one of Hitchens' heroes....Few writers wrote sharper sentences or treated words with more respect. USA Today, The 25 Big Books of Fall
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