Book by Paul Kalanithi
What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when life is catastrophically interrupted? What does it mean to have a child as your own life fades away?
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 in search of 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.
‘This is one of a handful of books I consider to be a universal donor- I would recommend it to anyone, everyone’ - Ann Patchett
‘Extraordinary…Remarkable…luminous…Lyrical, intimate, insistent and profound. Kalanithi had the mind of the polymath and the ear of a poet’- Daily Telegraph