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Random House
January 2016
On Sale: January 12, 2016
ISBN: 081298840X
EAN: 9780812988406
Kindle: B00XSSYR50
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Memoir
For readers of Atul Gawande, Andrew Solomon, and Anne
Lamott, a profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir by
a young neurosurgeon faced with a terminal cancer diagnosis
who attempts to answer the question What makes a life
worth living?
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.
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