This last sad and oddly inspiring book comes with an introduction by his editor at Vanity Fair, Graydon Carter and an afterword by his wife Carol Blue. Christopher Hitchens’s own pieces are shaped like a fugue; the theme is death, his own death, and the voice in each piece changes slightly as death comes closer. He begins simply with the theme: “I have more than once in my time woken up feeling like death. But nothing prepared me for the early morning in June when I came to consciousness feeling as if I were actually shackled to my own corpse. The whole cave of my chest and thorax seemed to have been hollowed out and then refilled with slow-drying cement. I could faintly hear myself breathe but could not manage to inflate my lungs.”<\/p>\n
Soon, it emerges that he has cancer of the oesophagus, the disease from which his father had died at the age of 79. Hitchens is only 61. It is clear that he will give anything to live. “I had real plans for the next decade \u201d\u00a6 Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read \u201d\u201c if indeed not to write \u201d\u201c the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger?”<\/p>\n
And so the struggle begins; he writes with a calm and searching honesty about the idea that “I don’t have a body, I am a body.”<\/p>\n