During the US book tour for his memoir, Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens collapsed in his New York hotel room to excoriating pain in his chest and thorax. You feel swamped with passivity and impotence: dissolving in powerlessness like a sugar lump in water. More, it is an instigatory experience: it compels you to get involved more deeply with the world around and inside you. The great polemicist, essayist, conversationalist, provocateur, arguer, has done something extraordinary in this book. In fact, many of his friends and family members confessed that they were worried about his soul and pressured him to make a profession of faith.

As a terrified, half-aware imbecile, I might even scream for a priest at the close of business, though I hereby state while I am still lucid that the entity thus humiliating itself would not in fact be “me.It is, however, sobering and grief-inducing to read this brave and harrowing account of his 'year of living dyingly' in the grip of an alien that succeeded where none of his debate opponents had in bringing him down. He makes mordant play with the bloggers who posted remarks about how God was punishing his atheism by removing the voice with which he blasphemed. I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient. Likewise, strangers on the internet placed bets about his eternal destiny, arguing that any atheist would “finally accept Jesus” on his deathbed.

Author Christopher Hitchens was given his “reminder” when he was diagnosed with cancer in 2010 and was told he had less than a year to live. In the most beautiful apposition of two of the simplest words in our language: the freedom of speech.Almost all men get cancer of the prostate if they live long enough: It’s an undignified thing but quite evenly distributed among saints and sinners, believers and unbelievers. Either they assured me that they wouldn’t offend me by offering prayers or they tenderly insisted that they would pray anyway. As with many of the Catholics who essentially pray for me to see the light as much as to get better, they were very honest. It's highly addictive to get core insights on personally relevant topics without repetition or triviality.