Mortality

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Far more seriously, The Great Mortality spends a good amount of time on the rise of anti-Semitism that followed the path of the plague. Pegged as scapegoats, pogroms broke out all over Europe, leading to the expulsion or murder of countless Jews. As Kelly points out, these pogroms were unrivaled until the 1930s. Whatever one's opinion on Christopher Hitchens' religious views, it's indisputable that the man can write. This collection of essays was penned after his diagnosis of terminal esophageal cancer and before his untimely death.

There is a rather touching chapter written by his wife in the afterword, and that gave the reader an idea of what Hitchens was like along his cancer journey. I just finished a book about Arabic science up to the 15 century. Most people in the Middle-East washed a lot, took baths, whenever they could. In fact, most civilizations of earlier times washed and used soap, even though soap was very expensive. Everybody bathed when they could manage it - except the Europeans. Wow. His essay about what it means to a writer to lose his voice is included in this book. His malady was esophageal cancer.

I bring death. My breath causes children to wither and die like young plants in the spring snow. I bring destruction. No people who looks upon me is ever the same. A Monograph of Stephen L Starkman’s book The Proximity to Mortality: A Visual Artist’s Journey Through Cancer is now available. The book also includes quotes from other cancer survivors reflecting on their experience navigating the disease, and reinforces recurring themes of fear, isolation, fatigue, and the work of the journey itself. Poems by cancer survivor Joanne Boyce also appear in the book. Hitchens is full frontal here, he is witty and he is honest and clever and his whole take on ‘living dyingly’ makes the journey more personal. He is a master at his craft, of including you in the story, you are not bored or even sympathetic in that false sense that you think you know what he is going through. He makes you laugh as he talks about reading reactions to his illness, how the zealots actually relish: When the plague burned itself out, its departure triggered major historical changes, including the Renaissance. Clergy, being one the hardest hit group, resulted in citizens believing that the ordained were not needed as a go-between with God sowing the seeds of the Reformation a couple of centuries later. Additionally, the depopulation of the workforce spurred technological advances in the invention of labor-saving devices. One invention included the Guttenberg printing press. Information he presents on long term climate change is... weird. Cites a conversation he had with P. Stott, a non-expert whose views on modern anthropogenic climate change are considerably outside the norm. In a book that is not about climate change, Kelly should have communicated current prevailing views, not those of an iconoclast. (I'm not saying Stott is entirely wrong, just that there was no reason for Kelly to insert his 'global warming ain't so bad' sentiment into a footnote.)

I realize that these may seem like small complaints, but I have high expectations for a nonfiction book. I have a hard time with it because I went to this book to learn, and I have difficulty trusting an author's research and expertise on a topic when he cannot bother to understand the meaning of the word "literally". There's no denying the integrity in his life, nor the intellect and wit in his speaking and writing. He does still get the last word. I love that this book comes out posthumously. It's as if he is talking to us right now: "And another thing!"

Sunspots are over-implicated in scientific literature as the cause of decadally repeating phenomena. He should have included that caveat when invoking sunspots. October 2014. My son is in law school, but we can't quite clear this problem up. It is so worrying to have such a long-term illness. He is however% better.