Reviewed by Robert Swan

“Thou’rt by no means valiant, for thou dost fear the soft and tender fork of a poor worm.”

William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, Act III, Scene I

Christopher Hitchens was, at 61, at the height of his fame and power, an intellectual scrapper with a razor-sharp intellect, eloquence and great wit. He was a ruthless interlocutor and a merciless logic-chopper. He tells us that he lived for blighting his opponents in debate. He wrote an international bestseller, god is not Great, which made him the bête noire of thousands of religiously committed individuals in the United States and abroad, and had published both a famous memoir and a marvelous collection of essays among other works. He was rich, had a loving family, and, for all his detractors, millions of devoted fans. In every respect, his was “a wonderful life.”

But in the midst of all this plenty, the fact of his mortality hit him with the suddenness and ferocity of an unexpected hammer-blow. On June 8, 2010, in New York for a book tour, he woke in excruciating pain with what turned out to be cancer of the esophagus, the disease that had killed his father at 79.

Mortality is a painful meditation not on mortality as such, but on Hitchens’ experience of it. While he touches on universal themes, this is a searing personal reflection on his experience both of discovering that he is dying, as well as his journey along the path to physical destruction. In fact he never finished the book, which is cobbled together from material mostly published in Vanity Fair.

Hitchens’ status as a magnificent wordsmith is well deserved, and the reader will find his eloquence fully on display in this book. Anyone with an appreciation for language will enjoy the book strictly on the level of Hitchens’ prose. For example, he describes Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger as “elderly villains,” condemning both while subtly registering his hearty disdain for organized religion by refusing to grant Ratzinger his title (Pope Benedict XVI).

On the level of his experience with death, he beautifully captures the moment of transport to “Tumorville,” where the lingua franca changes, and the people who administer it, oncologists, nurses and EMTs, are polite but firm guides to the rules of his new universe. He expresses the ambiguity of the cancer patient’s relationship to chemotherapy and radiation — poison that engenders excruciating pain and days of sickness in an effort to cure — providing in the process a harrowing if brief description of lying in bed anticipating with horror the next swallow, rendered almost unbearable by the very treatment designed to save his life.

Hitchens also has some interesting things to say about suffering’s capacity to make us stronger, articulated most famously by Nietzsche (the standard version: That which does not kill us makes us stronger). He points out that his physical suffering made him anything but stronger, though I think Nietzsche’s dictum has much more to do with the idea that experienced pain can make us psychologically more durable. The issue is problematic and invites complex exploration, but Hitchens’ point is nonetheless well taken.

In addition to meditations on the physical ravages of cancer and reflections on suffering, the book is interspersed with examples of Hitchens’ trademark loathing for religion. He publishes a particularly appalling e-mail written by a fundamentalist who asserts that it is right and proper for Hitchens to have been stricken with esophageal cancer because of his use of his throat to cast aspersions on the almighty. Hitchens eviscerates in unsparing language both the reasoning and religious position of the author of this e-mail, pointing out logical absurdities and asking if his family should be punished even if he has transgressed against the almighty. Hitchens’ language becomes strident, even while he tries to maintain a semblance of calm detachment: “First, which mere primate is so damn sure that he can know the mind of god?”

Note not only the expletive but, a Hitchens trademark as an anti-religious gadfly, the un-capitalized “god,” another dig at his Christian nemesis. He asks serious questions which anyone who is either a believer or an atheist should take seriously in exploring the viability of their faith, or lack of it. Despite Hitchens’ evident disdain for religion, he takes pains to acknowledge the kind regard of religious ministers and church leaders who pray for his recovery even while hoping he’ll repent and see the light (he doesn’t).

And it is in this regard that Hitchens’ response to his own condition is most remarkable. Who of us does not fear death? For most, the prospect of a loss of identity and consciousness is daunting, indeed the most horrible thing that can happen to us. Without the balm of a religious belief in a post-corporeal existence, we must accept that we simply cease to exist. Christopher Hitchens was just such a non-believer, with only his status as a material being to sustain him. In the absence of the body and the embodied brain, there is only the void. Yet he seems, on the basis of the testimony of this book and those who knew him, to have been undaunted to the end; if he feared the worm he never showed it. He died fighting all the way; a fitting close to a remarkable life.

Robert Swan teaches history and philosophy in the International Baccalaureate program at Richard Montgomery High School in Rockville, Md.