Woe to the reader coming to the work of Christopher Hitchens now. His death in December 2011 ensures, barring the release of unfinished work, we'll eventually have no new Hitchens essays, diatribes or screeds to look forward to. Mortality is of a piece with Hitchens's other works, though it also comes with extra weight: it's one thing to rail rhetorically against a cultural institution and another entirely to reflect on one's own impending death.
Unsurprisingly, Hitchens in decline is as self-aware as ever, acknowledging the "permanent temptation to be self-centered and even solipsistic"--permanent, as it's unlikely to wane before the body gives out. There are reflections on past writings, including a revisiting of his experience of being "waterboarded," that deepen the insights from the prior work. He decries the impositions of the well-meaning, arguing most paths of support are less about the dying and more about salving the anxieties of those left behind. Randy Pausch's The Last Lecture, to take one prominent example, is "so sugary that you may need an insulin shot to withstand it." Hitchens's own shots of painkillers provide physical relief and exacerbate the encroaching fear; he can end his days in relative lack of pain, but to do so robs him of his ability to continue writing. Fortunately for readers, he found what could best be described an "unhappy medium"--leaving behind an erudite, serious work that stands with the best writings on death. --Matthew Tiffany, counselor, writer for Condalmo