When Breath Becomes Air

A very poignant, finely observed memoir by a young neurosurgeon confronted with a fatal cancer diagnosis that aims to address the question, "What makes a life worth living?" for fans of Atul Gawande, Andrew Solomon, and Anne Lamott.

Paul Kalanithi, a thirty-six-year-old neurosurgeon who was about to finish his ten-year training, was told he had stage IV lung cancer. He was a patient fighting for life one moment, and a doctor the next, caring for the terminally ill. The future he and his spouse had envisaged vanished in an instant. Written in the first person, When Breath Becomes Air follows Kalanithi's journey from an unsophisticated medical student who was "possessed," as he put it, "by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life" to a neurosurgeon at Stanford University who works in the brain, the most important organ for human identity, and finally to a patient and newly father who must face his own mortality.

When faced with death, what makes life worthwhile? When the future flattens out into the present and ceases to be a ladder towards your life's ambitions, what do you do? What does it mean to raise a kid and see another life pass away? Kalanithi addresses a number of these issues in this very poignant and well observed book.

While working on this book, Paul Kalanithi passed away in March 2015, yet his words continue to serve as a gift and a guidance for all of us. "I began to realise that coming face to face with my own mortality, in a sense, had changed nothing and everything," he said. "It started to replay seven of Samuel Beckett's lines in my head: 'I can't go on. I'll continue. A talented writer who became a doctor and a patient, When Breath Becomes Air is a remarkable, life-affirming meditation on the difficulty of confronting death and the interaction between doctor and patient.