When Breath Becomes Air

Description

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 • 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. Read more

Features:

Product Details:

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House; 1st edition (January 12, 2016)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 228 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 081298840X
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 06
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 11.2 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.25 x 0.85 x 7.81 inches
• Best Sellers Rank: #1,070 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #1 in Medical Professional Biographies #2 in Sociology of Death (Books) #57 in Memoirs (Books)
• #1 in Medical Professional Biographies
• #2 in Sociology of Death (Books)