#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.
