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The world's greatest contrarian confronts his own death in this brave and unforgettable book. During the American book tour for his memoir, Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens collapsed in his hotel room with excruciating pain in his chest. As he would later write in the first of a series of deeply moving Vanity Fair pieces, he was being deported 'from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady.' Over the next year he experienced the full force of modern cancer treatment. Mortality is at once an unsparingly honest account of the ravages of his disease, an examination of cancer etiquette, and the coda to a lifetime of fierce debate and peerless prose. In this moving personal account of illness, Hitchens confronts his own death - and he is combative and dignified, eloquent and witty to the very last.
Courageous, insightful and candid thoughts on malady and mortality from one of our most celebrated writers.
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 ada...
Seasonal fluctuations in mortality are a persistent phenomenon, but variations from culture to culture pose fascinating questions. This book investigates whether sociodemographic and socioeconomic factors play a role as important for seasonal mortality as they do for mortality in general. Using modern statistical methods, the book shows, for example, that in the United States the fluctuations between winter and summer mortality are smaller the more years someone has spent in school.
Modern mortality modelling for actuaries and actuarial students, with example R code, to unlock the potential of individual data.
For those who don’t believe in an afterlife, the wisdom of the ages offers four great consolations for mortality: that death is benign and good; that mortal life provides its own kind of immortality; that true immortality would be awful; and that we experience the kinds of losses in life that we will eventually face in death. Can any of these consolations honestly reconcile us to our inevitable demise? In this timely book, Andrew Stark tests the psychological truth of these consolations and searches our collective literary, philosophical, and cultural traditions for answers to the question of how we, in the twenty-first century, might accept our mortal condition. Ranging from Epicurus and Heidegger to bucket lists, the flaming out of rock stars, and the retiring of sports jerseys, Stark’s poignant and learned exploration shows how these consolations, taken together, reveal death as a blessing no matter how much we may love life.
Zygmunt Bauman's new book is a brilliant exploration, from a sociological point of view, of the 'taboo' subject in modern societies: death and dying. The book develops a new theory of the ways in which human mortality is reacted to, and dealt with, in social institutions and culture. The hypothesis explored in the book is that the necessity of human beings to live with the constant awareness of death accounts for crucial aspects of the social organization of all known societies. Two different 'life strategies' are distinguished in respect of reactions to mortality. One, 'the modern strategy', deconstructs mortality by translating the insoluble issue of death into many specific problems of health and disease which are 'soluble in principle'. The 'post-modern strategy' is one of deconstructing immortality: life is transformed into a constant rehearsal of 'reversible death', a substitution of 'temporary disappearance' for the irrevocable termination of life. This profound and provocative book will appeal to a wide audience. It will also be of particular interest to students and professionals in the areas of sociology, anthropology, theology and philosophy.
This impressive full-colour atlas, with over 100 colour-coded and accessible maps, uniquely presents the geography of death in Britain. The first atlas published on this subject for over two decades, this book presents data from more than 14 million deaths over a 24-year period in Britain. The maps detail over 100 separate categories of cause of death, including various cancers, suicides, assault by firearms, multiple sclerosis, pneumonia, hypothermia, falls, and Parkinson's disease, and show how often these occurred in different neighbourhoods. Accompanying each map is a detailed description and brief geographical analysis - the number of people who have died due to each cause, the average age of death and ratio of male to female deaths are listed. Taken as a whole, these provide a comprehensive overview of the geographical pattern of mortality in Britain. This atlas will be essential reading for academics and students of social medicine, sociology of health and illness and epidemiology. It will also be valuable for anyone who wants a better understanding of patterns of mortality within Britain, including medical and healthcare practitioners, policy makers and researchers.
Heidegger&’s thinking has an underlying unity, this book argues, and has cogency for seemingly diverse domains of modern culture: philosophy and religion, aesthetics and literary criticism, intellectual history and social theory. &“The theme of mortality&—finite human existence&—pervades Heidegger&’s thought,&” in the author&’s words, &“before, during, and after his magnum opus, Being and Times, published in 1927.&” This theme is manifested in Heidegger&’s work not &“as funereal melodramatics or as despair and destructive nihilism&” but rather &“as a thinking within anxiety.&” & Four major subthemes in Heidegger&’s thinking are explored in the book&’s four par...