When Breath Becomes Air
Paul Kalanithi, 2016
Random House
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812988406
Summary
A profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir by a young neurosurgeon faced with a terminal cancer diagnosis who attempts to answer the question—What makes a life worth living?
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. 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. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—April 1, 1977
• Raised—Westchester, New York; Kingman, Arizona, USA
• Died—March 9, 2015
• Where—San Francisco Bay Area, California
• Education—2 B.As, M.A., Stanford University; M.P., Cambridge University; M.D. Yale University
• Awards—Lewis H. Nahum Prize (research on Tourette's)
Paul Kalanithi was an American neurosurgeon and writer. His book When Breath Becomes Air is a memoir about his life and illness, battling stage IV metastatic lung cancer. It was posthumously published by Random House in January 2016.
Kalanithi was born to Cardiologist Paul Kalanithi and his wife, Sue, on April 1, 1977 and lived in Westchester, New York. Kalanithi had two brothers.The family moved to Kingman, Arizona when Kalanithi was 10 where he graduated as the valedictorian of Kingman High School.
He attended Stanford University and graduated with a bachelor of arts and an master's degree in English literature as well as a bachelor of science in human biology. After Stanford, he earned a master’s in the history and philosophy of science and medicine from the University of Cambridge. He went on to the Yale School of Medicine. He graduated from Yale Medicine in 2007 cum laude, winning the Lewis H. Nahum Prize for his research on Tourette’s syndrome.
In May 2013, Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV metastatic lung cancer. He died 22 months later, having completed his neurosurgery residency at the Stanford Medical School and having become a first-time father only eight months before. At the time of his death, he was an instructor in the Department of Neurosurgery and a fellow at the Stanford Neurosciences Institute. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 2/10/2016.)
Book Reviews
I guarantee that finishing this book and then forgetting about it is simply not an option.... Part of this book’s tremendous impact comes from the obvious fact that its author was such a brilliant polymath. And part comes from the way he conveys what happened to him—passionately working and striving, deferring gratification, waiting to live, learning to die—so well. None of it is maudlin. Nothing is exaggerated. As he wrote to a friend: "It’s just tragic enough and just imaginable enough." And just important enough to be unmissable.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
Possesses the gravity and wisdom of an ancient Greek tragedy.... [Kalanithi] delivers his chronicle in austere, beautiful prose. The book brims with insightful reflections on mortality that are especially poignant coming from a trained physician familiar with what lies ahead.
Boston Globe
Devastating and spectacular.... [Kalanithi] is so likeable, so relatable, and so humble, that you become immersed in his world and forget where it’s all heading.
USA Today
It’s [Kalanithi’s] unsentimental approach that makes When Breath Becomes Air so original—and so devastating.... Its only fault is that the book, like his life, ends much too early.
Entertainment Weekly
Inspiring.... Kalanithi strives to define his dual role as physician and patient, and he weighs in on such topics as what makes life meaningful and how one determines what is most important when little time is left.... This deeply moving memoir reveals how much can be achieved through service and gratitude when a life is courageously and resiliently lived.
Publishers Weekly
[A] moving and penetrating memoir.... This eloquent, heartfelt meditation on the choices that make live worth living, even as death looms, will prompt readers to contemplate their own values and mortality.
Booklist
(Starred review.) A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer. Writing isn't brain surgery, but it's rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former.... A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also, consider these LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for When Breath Becomes Air...then take off on your own:
1. How would you describe Dr. Paul Kalanithi? What kind of a person was he?
2. One of the most profound questions addressed in this book is what makes life worth living in the face of death. We all face death, but Paul Kalanithi knew his was imminent. What answers, or at least consolations, does he find?
3. Kalanithi quotes Samuel Beckett's seven words: I can't go on. I'll go on." Talk about what that means, not just for Paul Kalanithi but for all of us. In the face of dying, especially prolonged, how does one "go on" or, in popular parlance, "keep on keeping on"?
4. One of the ironies of Kalanithi's life is that he postponed learning how to live in order to learn how to be a doctor. But once he knew he had lung cancer, he had to learn how to die. What are the ways in which he learned to live...and learned to face his death? Would you be as brave and thoughtful as Katanithi was?
5. Describe Kalanithi's love-hate relationship with medicine. He saw it as a job that kept his cardiologist father away from home. But how else did he see it?
6. What kind of a doctor was Kalanithi? Why was he, even at a young age, able to understand the needs of his patients more than so many other young doctors?
7. Kalanithi said that he acted in caring for his patients as "death's ambassador." "Those burdens, he wrote, "are what makes medicine holy and wholly impossible." What does he mean?
8. Once Kalanithi and his wife learned that he had terminal cancer, why did they decide to have a child? Even Kalanithi wonders if having a child wouldn't make it harder to die. What would you do?
9. How would you (or will you) go about dying? How do you think of death—as something distant, something frightening or horrible, as part of the normal spectrum of life, as a closing of this chapter of your life and the opening of another? What comes to mind when you think of your own demise?
10. Do you find When Breath Becomes Air enlightening, insightful, spiritual, maudlin? Would you describe it as an important book or merely interesting?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)