When Breath Becomes Air

<b>#1 <i>NEW YORK TIMES</i> BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • OVER TWO MILLION COPIES SOLD<br><br>This inspiring, exquisitely observed memoir finds hope and beauty in the face of insurmountable odds as an idealistic young neurosurgeon attempts to answer the question, <i>What makes a life worth living?<br></i></b><br><b>“Unmissable . . . Finishing this book and then forgetting about it is simply not an option.”—Janet Maslin, <i>The New York Times</i></b><br><br><b>ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: <i>The New York Times Book Review, People, </i>NPR<i>, The Washington Post, Slate, Harper’s Bazaar, Time Out New York, Publishers Weekly, BookPage</i></b><br><br><b>An <i>Oprah Daily </i>Best Nonfiction Book of the Past Two Decades • A <i>Kirkus Reviews </i>Best Nonfiction Book of the Century</b><br><br>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. <i>When Breath Becomes Air</i> 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.<br><br>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.<br><br>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.’” <i>When Breath Becomes Air</i> 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.<br><br><b>Finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction and the Books for a Better Life Award in Inspirational Memoir</b>