KALANITHI, PAUL / VERGHESE, ABRAHAM
At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decadeu0092s 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 Kalanithiu0092s transformation from a naïve medical student u0093possessed,u0094 as he wrote, u0093by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful lifeu0094 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.nnWhat 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.nnPaul Kalanithi died in March 2015, while working on this book, yet his words live on as a guide and a gift to us all. u0093I began to realize that coming face to face with my own mortality, in a sense, had changed nothing and everything,u0094 he wrote. u0093Seven words from Samuel Beckett began to repeat in my head: u0091I canu0092t go on. Iu0092ll go on.u0092u0094 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.
