Christopher Hitchens
Hitchens died of hospital-acquired pneumonia on 15 December 2011 in the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, aged 62. In accordance with his wishes, his body was donated to medical research. "Mortality", a collection of seven of Hitchen's "Vanity Fair" essays about his illness, was published posthumously in September 2012.
God Is Not Great
Writing in "The Huffington Post", Kabir Helminski noted that "Hitchens' debating style begins with a self-assured and urbane wit and ends with rude ad-hominem attacks stopping just short of insulting his opponent's mother." Helminski maintains that Hitchens's "verbal weaponry is formidable, and sometimes even entertaining" but that "in presenting the secular rationalist versus the religious fanatic, he obscures the fact that the greatest slaughters of human history, by far, were not the result of religious wars, but the result of secular or non-religious ideologies: Stalin, Hitler, Mao slaughtered more human beings than all the religious wars of history by a ten fold factor."