Book Bearings
When Breath Becomes Air
- 232 pages · about 4 hours
- First published 2016
- 35 editions
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1 About this book
Paul Kalanithi was in the last year of his training as a neurosurgeon at Stanford University when, in his thirties, he was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. In this memoir, published in 2016 after his death, he looks back at what led him to medicine, from a boyhood in Arizona, where his father was a doctor who was seldom home, through his studies and his years of surgical training. Then he describes what it is to become the patient, and how he and his wife, Lucy, decide to spend the time he has.
- Philosophy
- Personal Memoirs
- Biography
- Biography & autobiography
- Social science
- Cancer, patients
- Surgeons, biography
- Neurosurgeons
2 What to expect
A short memoir by a young neurosurgeon, written after he learned he had terminal lung cancer and published after his death. The first half is about his path into medicine and the moral weight of surgery; the second is about being a patient and deciding how to live with little time. It is thoughtful, literary and restrained, and it is very sad.
Good for readers who want: a doctor's memoir, reflections on mortality, and a short, moving read.
3 About Paul Kalanithi
Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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