When Breath Becomes Air

When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi For readers of
Atul Gawande Andrew Solomon and Anne Lamott a profoundly
moving exquisitely observed memoir by a young neurosurgeon
faced with a terminal cancer diagnosis who attempts to
answer the question What makes a life worth living? At the
age of thirty-six on the verge of completing a decades
worth of training as a neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi was
diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a
doctor treating the dying and the next he was a patient
struggling to live. And just like that the future he and
his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath Becomes Air
chronicles Kalanithis transformation from a na?ve medical
student possessed as he wrote by the question of what
given that all organisms die makes a virtuous and
meaningful life into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in
the brain the most critical place for human identity and
finally into a patient and new father confronting his own
mortality. What makes life worth living in the face of
death? What do you do when the future no longer a ladder
toward your goals in life flattens out into a perpetual
present? What does it mean to have a child to nurture a
new life as another fades away? These are some of the
questions Kalanithi wrestles with in this profoundly
moving exquisitely observed memoir. Paul Kalanithi died in
March 2015 while working on this book yet his words live
on as a guide and a gift to us all. I began to realize
that coming face to face with my own mortality in a sense
had changed nothing and everything he wrote. Seven words
from Samuel Beckett began to repeat in my head: I cant go
on. Ill go on. When Breath Becomes Air is an unforgettable
life-affirming reflection on the challenge of facing death
and on the relationship between doctor and patient from a
brilliant writer who became both.