#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 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.
