Book summary of When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
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.
Details of e-book When Breath Becomes Air
- Author(s): Paul Kalanithi
- Title: When Breath Becomes Air
- Rating: 4.8 out of 5 base on 27879 reviews
- Publisher: Random House; 1st edition (January 12, 2016)
- ISBN-10: 081298840X
- ISBN-13: 9780812988406
- Language: English
- Print length: 228 pages
- Categories: Medical Books
