ً When Breathe Becomes Air

At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Dr. Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor making a living treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. Just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated.

With incredible literary quality, philosophical acuity, and medical authority, Kalanithi chronicles his transformation from a naive medical student into a neurosurgeon, and then into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality.
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.