When Breath Becomes Air
<p><b>Number-one</b><b><i> New York Times</i></b><b> best seller. Pulitzer Prize finalist.</b></p> <p><b>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: </b><b><i>What makes a life worth living?</i></b> </p> <p>Named one of the best books of the year by: </p> <p></p> <ul> <li><i>The New York Times Book Review </i></li> <li><i>People </i></li> <li><i>NPR </i></li> <li><i>The Washington Post </i></li> <li><i>Slate </i></li> <li><i>Harper’s Bazaar </i></li> <li><i>Time Out New York </i></li> <li><i>Publishers Weekly </i></li> <li><i>BookPage </i></li> </ul> <p>Finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction and the Books for a Better Life Award in Inspirational Memoir.</p> <p>At the age of 36, 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. <i>When Breath Becomes Air</i> 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. </p> <p>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. </p> <p>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.'" <i>When Breath Becomes Air</i> 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. </p>