
When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
Expected Publication: January 12, 2015 by Random House
Other work(s): N/A
Genres: Autobiography/Memoir
Pages: 256
Rating: 4/5, PG-13
At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, the next he was a patient struggling to live.
When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a medical student asking what makes a virtuous and meaningful life into a neurosurgeon working in the core of human identity – the brain – and finally into a patient and a new father.
What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when when life is catastrophically interrupted? What does it mean to have a child as your own life fades away?
Paul Kalanithi died while working on this profoundly moving book, yet his words live on as a guide to us all. When Breath Becomes Air is a life-affirming reflection on facing our mortality and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a gifted writer who became both.
An intensely thought-provoking, heart-rending memoir of another life ended too soon.
In When Breath Becomes Air, 36-year-old Paul Kalanithi, a budding neurosurgeon, eloquently reflects upon his life-long search for meaning and his attempts at a meaningful life, while facing a future made uncertain by terminal illness. Though lung cancer ultimately claimed his life, Kalanithi revealed that it did not claim his identity, his ambitions,… Continue reading →