Review: When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

5 stars for When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi.

This is one powerful little book, small on the outside but big on the inside.

In his memoir, Paul Kalanithi describes his search for life's meaning, why he chooses neurosurgery as his specialty, when he reaches the pinnacle of residency, why he sheds his surgeon's coat to put on a patient's gown only to swap it back again, and how he starts to view the world through two perspectives - see death as both doctor and patient - the moment he is diagnosed with a terminal illness.

Central to the book is one big question: What makes life meaningful enough to go on living?

Like his patients, Paul Kalanithi has to face his mortality and try to understand what makes his life worth living. He has to figure out what is most important to him.

Heartwarming and yet heartbreaking at the same time, Paul Kalanithi writes with a focused fluency even as he wrestles with death in every step of the way to share his pains and gains and losses.

The fact of death is unsettling. Yet there is no other way to live. ~ Paul Kalanithi



Publisher: Random House; 1 edition
Publication date: 12 Jan 2016

*** Notable passage 1 ***

As a resident, my highest ideal was not saving lives — everyone dies eventually — but guiding a patient or family to an understanding of death or illness.

*** Notable passage 2 ***

The fact of death is unsettling. Yet there is no other way to live.

*** Notable passage 3 ***

As a doctor, you have a sense of what it’s like to be sick, but until you’ve gone through it yourself, you don’t really know.

*** Notable passage 4 ***

But if I did not know what I wanted, I had learned something...the physician’s duty is not to stave off death or return patients to their old lives, but to take into our arms a patient and family whose lives have disintegrated and work until they can stand back up and face, and make sense of, their own existence.

~ When Breath Becomes Air
Paul Kalanithi

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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 making a living treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. Just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated.

When Breath Becomes Air, which features a Foreword by Dr. Abraham Verghese and an Epilogue by Kalanithi’s wife, Lucy, 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 young neurosurgeon at Stanford, guiding patients toward a deeper understanding of death and illness, and finally into a patient and a new father to a baby girl, 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.

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.’” When Breath Becomes Air is an unforgettable, life-affirming reflection on the challenge of facing mortality and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a gifted writer who became both.

*Blurb from author's website*

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