When Breath Becomes Air

Paul Kalanithi was a neurosurgery chief resident at Stanford, months from finishing a decade of training, when a series of symptoms led to a diagnosis of stage IV lung cancer at age 36. He had spent his career on the other side of that conversation, delivering terminal diagnoses to patients and helping them decide how to spend whatever time remained; the book is his attempt to sit in that chair himself, as both the doctor who understands the odds and the patient who has to live inside them.

The memoir is really two intertwined stories: how a literature-and-philosophy student became a neurosurgeon obsessed with the question of what makes a life meaningful when the brain — the physical seat of identity — is what he operated on every day, and then how that same man had to answer his own question with radically less time than he'd planned. He finished the book's final chapter dictating from memory as his health failed; his wife Lucy wrote the epilogue after his death in March 2015.

Who should read it

Anyone facing mortality themselves, caring for someone who is, or simply wanting a clearer, less sentimental way to think about what a meaningful life actually requires. It's also valuable for anyone in medicine who wants to see the doctor-patient relationship from both sides at once.

About the author

Paul Kalanithi was an American neurosurgeon and writer who trained at Stanford, Cambridge, and Yale before completing his residency; he wrote this memoir after his 2013 lung cancer diagnosis and died in 2015 at age 37, before its publication.