On June 8, 2010, while on a book tour for his bestselling memoir, Hitch-22 , Christopher Hitchens was stricken in his New York hotel room with excruciating pain in his chest and thorax. As he would later write in the first of a series of award-winning columns for Vanity Fair, he suddenly found himself being deported "from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady." Over the next eighteen months, until his death in Houston on December 15, 2011, he wrote constantly and brilliantly on politics and culture, astonishing readers with his capacity for superior work even in extremis.

Throughout the course of his ordeal battling esophageal cancer, Hitchens adamantly and bravely refused the solace of religion, preferring to confront death with both eyes open. In this riveting account of his affliction, Hitchens poignantly describes the torments of illness, discusses its taboos, and explores how disease transforms experience and changes our relationship to the world around us. By turns personal and philosophical, Hitchens embraces the full panoply of human emotions as cancer invades his body and compels him to grapple with the enigma of death.

MORTALITY is the exemplary story of one man's refusal to cower in the face of the unknown, as well as a searching look at the human predicament. Crisp and vivid, veined throughout with penetrating intelligence, Hitchens's testament is a courageous and lucid work of literature, an affirmation of the dignity and worth of man.

剋裏斯托弗·希欽斯 Christopher Hitchens，美國人，專欄作者、記者、評論員、隨筆作傢，《名利場》雜誌、《石闆》雜誌、《新政治傢》雜誌、《紐約時報書評》和《大西洋月刊》等雜誌的特約編輯、撰稿人，作品不計其數，還包括國 際暢銷書 《神不偉大：宗教如何毒害一切》、《希奇22：迴憶錄》和《有待商榷》等。“全球百大公知”排名第五；美國《時代》周刊評選的十大“入侵”美國的英國人。他於2011年12月15日逝世。去世一年多以來，幾乎每周，他還在被《紐約時報》和其他媒體提及或引述。