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- 256 pages
- 9 hours of reading
More about the book
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.
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When breath becomes air, Paul Kalanithi
- Language
- Released
- 2019
- product-detail.submit-box.info.binding
- (Paperback)
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- Language
- English
- Authors
- Paul Kalanithi
- Released
- 2019
- Format
- Paperback
- Pages
- 256
- ISBN10
- 1984801821
- ISBN13
- 9781984801821
- Series
- Tags
- Non-Fiction, Social Sciences, True Stories, Biographies, Health & Medicine, Medicine, Philosophical Topics, Love, Philosophy, Contemporary Fiction, Autobiographies & Memoirs, Health, USA, Death, Medicine, Life, Diseases, Mourning, Fate, Cancer, Tumors, Medical environment, Mortality
- First published
- 2016
- Original title
- When Breath Becomes Air
- Rating
- 4.35 out of 5
- Description
- 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.