Christopher Hitchens Dead Died

http://astf.tk Christopher Hitchens, the author, writer and Vanity Fair contributing editor, has died, the magazine announced late Thursday. He was 62.
Hitchens, who had been battling esophageal cancer since early 2010, died at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, surrounded by friends, Vanity Fair said.
"There will never be another like Christopher," Vanity Fair editor-in-chief Graydon Carter said in a statement. "A man of ferocious intellect, who was as vibrant on the page as he was at the bar. Those who read him felt they knew him, and those who knew him were profoundly fortunate souls."
The brash, combative and provocative Hitchens was an "incomparable critic, masterful rhetorician, fiery wit, and fearless bon vivant," Vanity Fair's Juli Weiner wrote in one of what will assuredly be many memoriams in the next several hours.
His last book, "Hitch-22," was published shortly before his diagnosis, forcing him to cancel a book tour.
"I have been advised by my physician that I must undergo a course of chemotherapy on my esophagus," Hitchens wrote then. "This advice seems persuasive to me. I regret having had to cancel so many engagements at such short notice."
Yet, he continued to write about his fight with cancer--among other weighty topics--in the months that followed.
"Cancer victimhood contains a permanent temptation to be self-centered and even solipsistic," he wrote in Vanity Fair last year.
In June 2011, he observed: "My chief consolation in this year of living dyingly has been the presence of friends."
We'll post selections of remembrances from some of those friends, and obituaries, below. Check back here for updates.
The New Yorker's Christopher Buckley:
We were friends for more than thirty years, which is a long time but, now that he is gone, seems not nearly long enough. I was rather nervous when I first met him, one night in London in 1977, along with his great friend Martin Amis. I had read his journalism and was already in awe of his brilliance and wit and couldn't think what on earth I could bring to his table. I don't know if he sensed the diffidence on my part—no, of course he did; he never missed anything—but he set me instantly at ease, and so began one of the great friendships and benisons of my life. It occurs to me that "benison" is a word I first learned from Christopher, along with so much else.
NPR's David Folkenflik:
Hitchens confronted his disease in part by writing, bringing the same unsparing insight to his mortality that he had directed at so many other subjects. Over the years, Hitchens' caustic attention was directed at a broad range of subjects, including Henry Kissinger, Prince Charles, Bob Hope, Michael Moore, the Dalai Lama and Mother Teresa.
"If you're at Vanity Fair and you're talking about some of the things that Christopher has taken on, at the top of the list is going to be Mother Teresa," said Graydon Carter, editor at Vanity Fair and a longtime friend.
The Associated Press' Hillel Italie:
Eloquent and intemperate, bawdy and urbane, he was an acknowledged contrarian and contradiction—half-Christian, half-Jewish and fully non-believing; a native of England who settled in America; a former Trotskyite who backed the Iraq war and supported George W. Bush. ... He was a militant humanist who believed in pluralism and racial justice and freedom of speech, big cities and fine art and the willingness to stand the consequences. He was smacked in the rear by then-British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and beaten up in Beirut. He once submitted to waterboarding to prove that it was indeed torture.

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[Pundit2k]

Dawkins is not dead. Why did you list him as one of your dead idols?

[EpicAthiest]

@Pundit2k

I meant it as a list of people who inspire me. Coincidentally, he's the only one alive on the list.

[nonoobtubeplz122]

Poor guy kinda ironic how he died for years he talked against the belief of God and now his own vice

[EpicAthiest]

@nonoobtubeplz122

Everyone's going to die sooner or later. There's no irony in an inevitability.

[lc237]

I will miss him so. I never met him but he meant so much to me and so many others. Thanks for the video.

[AwesomeYawn]

i miss him

[TelekinesisOnline]

@cryptocrack

No. It's like the bible. A load on metaphoric poetry. It's science amounts to a load of assumptions (many of which are false) and the rest for you to think it's science.

For example, the qur'an says the earth is the shape of an egg. WRONG, it's an oval shape. We're in serious trouble if the gravity shifts towards one end of the planet. Also, as taught to many muslim schools, the mountains exist to protect the earth and that sea water and freshwater do not mix...TOTAL CRAP.

[tonestar100]

@kerryoke68 Hey, that's clever! When you've nothing more substantive to say, assume I'm angry... or SO angry, as you put it. Geez, you really "blew my doors off" with that one! ARGHHHHHHH! How's that for angry? Whatever you say chinsaw boy. Hahahahahaha!!!!!!