#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • This inspiring, exquisitely observed memoir finds hope and beauty in the face of insurmountable odds as an idealistic young neurosurgeon attempts to answer the question What makes a life worth living? NAMED ONE OF PASTE’S BEST MEMOIRS OF THE DECADE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • People • NPR … OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • People • NPR • The Washington Post • Slate • Harper’s Bazaar • Time Out New York • Publishers Weekly • BookPage
Finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction and the Books for a Better Life Award in Inspirational Memoir
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.
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A read for everyone
It was so good, it nearly broke my heart. I will not forget this book, its beautiful forward and the touching ending of the book, but not the story.
An excellent true story of living knowing you’re dying. Inspirational, real.
Since we ALL will eventually die, it behooves us to read these kinds of books. Written by a physician, it is poignant to the max in his recounting his decline and soon coming death.
Excellent!
Very thought provoking book. Courageous story telling in the twilight of life and a gift of Love
One of the most inspirational and informative books about a courageous man documenting what it is like to go through ALS and Not be a victim. It demonstrates the old adage, “it is not what happens to you, it is how you handle it.” This man was a beacon of strength.
I’m fascinated by the authors abilty to live and pursue dreams while so sick. What an incredible life.
With the admonition, ‘physician, heal thyself’ running through my mind, I could not help but wonder why this brilliant doctor did not comprehend the meaning of the symptoms he suffered for several years before seeing a diagnosis that revealed his fatal cancer. It was nevertheless inspiring to read how he coped with his illness and how he ensured that something of himself would establish the next generation.
One of the best
Patient: one who endures hardship without complaint.
I know about cancer. My parents died of it.
Mom had psoriatic arthritis and psoriasis that had been controlled by Methotrexate, allowing her a better quality of life during her last years. But she always feared an dependent old age, unable to take care of herself.
She had been a lifelong smoker until the birth of my son when she decided to give it up. It turned out to be easier than she ever imagined.
She was fifty-seven, recovering from a broken knee, when she convinced her doctor that her excruciating back pain was not normal. A CAT scan revealed cancer spread through her body, in her lungs, pancreas, brain, and bones. She had weeks or months.
After her first chemo she came home and called all her friends and relatives, calming chatting and telling them the news. She instructed me on the value of her Depression glass collection and what jewelry was ‘good’.
She wondered if I remembered my grandparents who had died before I was three, hoping that our two-and-a-half-year-old son would remember his doting grandmother. It was her only regret, for she had given up hope of ever having a grandchild and had found joy as a grandmother.
Two weeks later she was in the hospital, choosing morphine over pain, leaving behind a weeping family and devastated husband.
Fast forward sixteen years. My father had found a girlfriend and was enjoying life when his Non-Hodgkins lymphoma came out of remission. Whereas Mom accepted the news, Dad was determined to fight the cancer. I stayed at the hospital with him during the day, and my brother came after work. He held on for ten weeks before the oncologists allowed his removal to Hospice. Dad was 78. My brother and I were now all that was left.
I have uncles and a grandfather who died in their early fifties. It is hard to lose someone ‘before their time’. I feel for my cousins whose dads passed when they were young adults. What is harder to accept is when death comes to people under forty, or thirty, or even as children.
*****
“I was driven less by achievement than by trying to understand, in earnest: What makes human life meaningful?”
Paul Kalanithi was driven to understand the most basic question of life: What makes life meaningful? What kind of life is worth living? Can a life cut short, on the cusp of reaching its potential, still hold meaning? He studied medicine, biology, philosophy, literature, and poetry searching for understanding. He attended Medical school to “bear witness to the twinned mysteries of death, its experiential and biological manifestations: at once deeply personal and utterly impersonal.” He realized that physicians must understand their craft intellectually but also morally.
Had I been more religious in my youth, I might have become a pastor, for it was the pastoral role I’d sought.
At age 36, soon to graduate and begin his career as a neurosurgeon and planning to start a family, Paul was diagnosed with terminal cancer.
“And with that, the future I had imagined, the one just about to be realized, the culmination of decades of striving, evaporated.”
The cancer could be managed, held off, for an uncertain length of time. As a doctor Paul understood his case, the options and the probability of their effects. He was also now a patient, needing to make sense of his options and potential, finding what would give meaning to his time left on earth.
I began to view the world through two perspectives; I was starting to see death as both doctor and patient.
His love for language, writing, literature, and deep medical and scientific knowledge allowed Paul to express and probe his experience as a dying cancer patient, leaving behind this memoir.
Paul tells us about his patients and what they taught him, and about being a patient and what he learned. We hear about the rigorous and crushing work of residency and how a slight touch with a scalpel can be irrevocable. As a cancer patient, he had to decide how to live–oriented towards life or death–and whether to have a child he won’t live to see grow up.
…even if I’m dying, until I actually die, I am still living.
Paul did not live to finish his memoir. The moving epilogue is written by his wife. The Forward by Abraham Verghese warns us, “Be ready. Be seated. See what courage sounds like. See how brave it is to reveal yourself in this way. But above all, see what it is to still live, to profoundly influence the lives of others after you are gone, by your words…Listen to Paul. In the silences between his words, listen to what you have to say back. Therein lies the message.”
I tried to like this book as I, too, have lung cancer and thought there would be some common ground I would find but just couldn’t find that. Maybe because I am alot older then the author and my kids are grown. Maybe I just didn’t understand his writing. We all go through our own journeys with cancer and I am really sorry for him and his family.
Life does not expect to take a 30-something neurosurgeon from the earth, but it happens in When Breath Becomes Air. The reader goes through all the soul-searching, achy, tormenting moments with the brilliant doctor and his wife and colleagues. Because this man could write as well as do micro-surgery, his story is told masterfully. I will never be the same.
It was enthralling while I read it, but like air it left me with nothing to hold onto
A thoughtful and inspiring consideration of human death in this modern age.
Lookout to ones life… mustreader for medical students.
Respectful of passing wtih thoughtful dignity.
I read this when it was first published. So I’ve forgotten much of the detail of the book. After reading the book, however, I purchased copies for a couple of other people who were going through some life struggles. It relates the story of how one person (a professor) was able to put the devastating news of his impending death into the best possible perspective & to live his best life for as long as he had left. Inspirational.
I read very quickly, and constantly. Many books just aren’t memorable, though they may be enjoyable. This one is not what you would call enjoyable, because it is tragic, but it is certainly memorable; in fact, unforgettable.
I didn’t realize this was a personal perspective of a Dr. studying the brain and it’s scientific basis for emotions and living with the reality of his cancer progression. It made me cry to see how he connected that with his reality of being on the other side as a patient. He gave an inspiring perspective.