#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • OVER TWO MILLION COPIES SOLD 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? “Unmissable . . . Finishing this book and then forgetting about it is simply not an
option.”—Janet Maslin The New York Times ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York
Times Book Review People NPR The Washington Post Slate Harper’s Bazaar Time Out New York
Publishers Weekly BookPage An Oprah Daily Best Nonfiction Book of the Past Two Decades • A
Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Century 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. Finalist
for the PEN Center USA Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction and the Books for a Better Life
Award in Inspirational Memoir
