When Breath Becomes Air

When Breath Becomes Air

Author: Paul Kalanithi
Desc: 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 decade's 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 Kalanithi's transformation from a naïve 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 can't go on. I'll 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.