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.

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 death and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a brilliant writer who became both. 



I desperately want to be moved by and to love this book when it was assigned by my friend Stacey for our bookgroup read.  I opened it with enthusiasm and an open heart.  Sadly, that was quashed very quickly.  Paul Kalanithi was, obviously, a great, loving man who had a powerful love of life, and it was sad that it was taken away from him so suddenly and at such a young age.  His (short) life story did appear to be amazing and one is left wondering what he would have achieved had he lived.

However, I am not reviewing his life but the book of his life.  The best part of the book were the Foreward by Abraham Verghese and the Afterword by Mr Kalanithi's wife.  The reason for this was editing.  The book read exactly like an unedited manuscript.  a very rough first draft of notes he made before actually bringing them all together into a cohesive book  and then putting that book through an Editor to improve it even more.  Some people might like it better for that very rawness and roughness, but it irritated me to the point of not enjoying the read.

I think this is a love itor hate it book, no middle road.  Harsh but true.