When Breath Becomes Air
2016 • 256 pages
Ratings179
Average rating4.4
15
Ratings179
Average rating4.4
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
Reviews with the most likes.
Kalanithi‘s story makes it clear both why medicine becomes dehumanized (it's hard to remain open in the face of suffering) and how powerful it can be when doctors retain a sense of the sacred mystery of their calling and the reality of the human core that is not only body or mechanism. This book is a record of a brave man's life and its writing an act of courage itself, the reading of which can help us face our lives more bravely too. Science and spirit are not opposites, but in their true nature belong together. It's the battle to bring them into harmony that is our true challenge today, and this book an eloquent example of that fight.
A powerful story of aspiration and the search for meaning in life. In the brutal twist that we all expect from the cover, the doctor seeking to understand how meaning, illness, knowledge, and death are intertwined gets to find out first hand.
There is a lot of message in this book about thinking about what gives your life meaning. If you had 3 months, what would you do today....three years? thirty? What should you do if those things are different? The idea of confronting the tragedy of uncertainty is powerful. I think that the author could have been a fantastic writer and perhaps (given the story) neurosurgeon. Tragically, he did not get that chance. This book is edited from notes he put together as his life came apart.
Having recently read “Being Mortal” by Atul Gawande, I highly recommend that readers of Kalanithi's book also look into that one. Atul had the blessing of time to complete and expound on his ideas in his book.
Whew. The audiobook was well done and I definitely cried on the way to work all week listening to it. Moving and thoughtful, and though I know his verbosity and word choices were complaints from other readers, I always welcome a chance encounter with seldomly used words, like ineluctable. This book will stay with me.
