THE BLURB: 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.
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.
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.
THE SCOOP: Since I write YA fiction, that's usually what I like to spotlight on my blog, but I had to make an exception for this memoir, especially since I gave it to my own teenagers to read. I'm not sure when the last time I cried reading a book was, before this one.
It's meditative and poetic and made me think about my own life. It also reminded me of my dad, who is alive and healthy, but who is also a brilliant doctor and scientist and lover of literature who always centered his family.
I guess I'm just glad I feel certainty about a life after this one, or this would have been even more of a tear-jerker.
THE VERDICT: This is a book that will stay with you. Paul Kalanithi wrote, "I began to realize that coming face to face with my own mortality, in a sense, had changed nothing and everything. Seven words from Samuel Beckett began to repeat in my head: 'I can't go on. I'll go on.'"
Isn't that what makes life so impossible, tragic, and heroic?
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