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

Based on his columns in Vanity Fair that chronicled his year-and-a-half battle with esophageal cancer, Mortality is Christopher Hitchens at his most honest and

Courageous, insightful and candid thoughts on malady and mortality from one of our most celebrated writers.

Seasonal fluctuations in mortality are a persistent phenomenon across populations. In Western countries of the Northern hemisphere, mortality is typically large