When Breath Becomes Air

Paul Kalanithi's plan was to spend the first twenty years of his working life as a neurosurgeon, and the next twenty as a writer, but fate had other ideas. Just as he was finishing his residency, he received a diagnosis he understood too well: terminal lung cancer. He focused his considerable discipline and ability on getting back in the operating room and completing the book he knew he had in him, and he left us this clear-eyed, devastating, and somehow joyous record of his education and his illness that will cause you to reexamine what you think about doctors and patients, about the purpose of life and the undeniable presence of death.