#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.
