“I don’t believe in the wisdom of children, nor in the wisdom of the old. There is a moment, a cusp, when the sum of gathered experience is worn down by the details of the living. We are never so wise as when we live in the moment.”
![](http://library.northumbria.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/08/when-breath-becomes-air.jpg)
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.
Comments from other readers:
“A heart breaking read that makes you consider if your life would be valued if you died at such a young age (would I look back and be proud!) From a clinical point it reminds me of the importance of the patient and their thoughts when caring for them.”
“I found this book to be inspiring on both a professional and personal level. So much so I read it again to take quotes, something I have never done before. Paul Kalanithi has an incredible way of putting into words better than I ever could, thought feelings and experiences of being a health professional, a patient and a person coming to terms with death. ”
Filed Under Uncategorized Posted by devcore on 26 January 2021