I received a book on 25th December. I am sharing with you, beloved honorable reader.
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," he wrote. "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.
The Seismic Empathy of Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air
Sentences like this: erudite, insightful, sensitive, heartbreaking — appear on almost every page of Kalanithi’s book, which describes his training as a neurosurgeon and tragic evolution to patient when he was diagnosed with lung cancer at the age of thirty-six. (The writer died last year.) The book will change the way you think about medicine, the way you think about doctors, and, quite possibly the way you think about life itself. “While all doctors treat diseases, neurosurgeons’ work is the crucible of identity,” Kalanithi writes. “Every operation on the brain is, by necessity, a manipulation of the substance of our selves.” It is impossible to read his book without confronting the substance of the self, and asking what, exactly, it means.
It is tempting to say Kalanithi was a doctor with the soul of a poet, but that formulation does a disservice to both poets and physicians. And while it may seem amazing that he was able to master two such seemingly dissimilar disciplines, when so many of us struggle to craft a coherent thank you note and effectively apply a Band-Aid, the long line of doctor-writers suggests the two are less dissimilar than one might imagine. “When there’s no place for the scalpel,” Kalanithi writes, “words are the surgeon’s only tool.”
Chekhov was a doctor; so was William Carlos Williams. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; Keats; Somerset Maugham: all trained to practice medicine. More recent examples include Rivka Galchen, Ethan Canin, Khaled Hosseini, Daniel Mason, Chris Adrian, and Henry Marsh. Some became doctors before turning to writing; others pursued medicine after getting MFAs. Kalanithi earned a master’s degree in English literature at Stanford before studying medicine at Yale. As a teen, he once said, he assumed he’d grow up to be a writer, but once he discovered the world of medicine, he realized it was the perfect place for his passions.“When there’s no place for the scalpel,” Kalanithi writes, “words are the surgeon’s only tool.”TWEET THIS QUOTE
Which, when you think about it, makes sense. Writers’ hardest work is not just describing the human condition, but exploring what gives a life worth. Doctors not only save lives, but must confront questions about the very nature of life itself, and, as Kalanithi writes, make tough choices about when a life is no longer of value. In order to make these decisions, they must be on intimate terms with the meaning (or, at least, their meaning) of what life is.
Perhaps, then, the distance between medicine and literature starts out very short. One of the first thing doctors learn is how to take notes on their patients, how to compile a history that is succinct, accurate, and useful. In the first year of residency, Kalanithi writes, “one is little more than a paper pusher against a backdrop of life and death.” But as he learned the art of the concise case history, he vowed to treat his “paperwork as patients, and not vice versa.” Because the longer he spent in the hospital, and the more active a role he played in the saving of lives, the easier it became to distance himself from the true meaning of his work: “In the midst of this endless barrage of head injuries, I began to suspect that being so close to the fiery light of such moments only blinded me to their nature, like trying to learn astronomy by staring directly at the sun.”
When Kalanithi finds himself eating an ice cream sandwich as a family mourns the death of their twenty-two-year-old son, he realizes he is in danger of losing his empathy, of becoming the type of doctor more interested in diseases than the people suffering from them. It seems this may be exactly what afflicts many doctors over the course of their careers – either from fatigue, frustration, or the need to avert their eyes from the blazing truth of what they do each day, they move away from the writer-like empathy they started out with, the hypersensitivity to the nature of life. Luckily for us, this doesn’t always happen, and we sometimes get to read wonderful books by doctors like Paul Kalanithi, for whom medicine was an art, a calling, and a gift, just like his memoir.
About this book
166Pages
3 - 4Hours to read
45kTotal words
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," he wrote. "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.
About the author:
Paul Kalanithi: A neurosurgeon who took to writing, Paul Kalanithi held degrees in human biology, English Literature and history and philosophy of science and medicine from Cambridge and Stanford Universities before finally graduating from Yale School of Medicine. He was also bestowed with the highest award for research in the field of medicine by the American Academy of Neurological Surgery.
Review
" A vital book about dying. Awe-inspiring and exquisite. Obligatory reading for the living." (Nigella Lawson)
" Rattling. Heartbreaking. Beautiful." (Atul Gawande, author of BEING MORTAL)
" A great, indelible book ... as intimate and illuminating as Atul Gawande’s “Being Mortal,” to cite only one recent example of a doctor’s book that has had exceptionally wide appeal ... I guarantee that finishing this book and then forgetting about it is simply not an option ... gripping from the start ... 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 beunmissable." ( New York Times)
" Powerful and poignant." ( The Sunday Times)
"Less a memoir than a reflection on life and purpose… [A] vital book." ( The Economist)
"Extraordinary…Remarkable… luminous, revelatory memoir about mortality and what makes being alive meaningful ...Lyrical, intimate, insistent and profound. Kalanithi had the mind of the polymath and the ear of a poet." (Heather HodsonDaily Telegraph)
"Powerful and poignant… Elegantly written posthumous memoir… Should be compulsory for anyone who intends to be a doctor… A profound reflection on the meaning of life." (Daisy Goodwin Sunday Times)
"A stark, fascinating, well-written and heroic memoir." (Stefanie Marsh The Times)
"The power of this book lies in its eloquent insistence that we are all confronting our mortality every day, whether we know it or not. The real question we face, Kalanithi writes, is not how long, but rather how, we will live – and the answer does not appear in any medical textbook." (Alice OkeeffeGuardian)
" Exceptional." (Katie Law Evening Standard)
The Seismic Empathy of Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air
Sentences like this: erudite, insightful, sensitive, heartbreaking — appear on almost every page of Kalanithi’s book, which describes his training as a neurosurgeon and tragic evolution to patient when he was diagnosed with lung cancer at the age of thirty-six. (The writer died last year.) The book will change the way you think about medicine, the way you think about doctors, and, quite possibly the way you think about life itself. “While all doctors treat diseases, neurosurgeons’ work is the crucible of identity,” Kalanithi writes. “Every operation on the brain is, by necessity, a manipulation of the substance of our selves.” It is impossible to read his book without confronting the substance of the self, and asking what, exactly, it means.
It is tempting to say Kalanithi was a doctor with the soul of a poet, but that formulation does a disservice to both poets and physicians. And while it may seem amazing that he was able to master two such seemingly dissimilar disciplines, when so many of us struggle to craft a coherent thank you note and effectively apply a Band-Aid, the long line of doctor-writers suggests the two are less dissimilar than one might imagine. “When there’s no place for the scalpel,” Kalanithi writes, “words are the surgeon’s only tool.”
Chekhov was a doctor; so was William Carlos Williams. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; Keats; Somerset Maugham: all trained to practice medicine. More recent examples include Rivka Galchen, Ethan Canin, Khaled Hosseini, Daniel Mason, Chris Adrian, and Henry Marsh. Some became doctors before turning to writing; others pursued medicine after getting MFAs. Kalanithi earned a master’s degree in English literature at Stanford before studying medicine at Yale. As a teen, he once said, he assumed he’d grow up to be a writer, but once he discovered the world of medicine, he realized it was the perfect place for his passions.“When there’s no place for the scalpel,” Kalanithi writes, “words are the surgeon’s only tool.”TWEET THIS QUOTE
Which, when you think about it, makes sense. Writers’ hardest work is not just describing the human condition, but exploring what gives a life worth. Doctors not only save lives, but must confront questions about the very nature of life itself, and, as Kalanithi writes, make tough choices about when a life is no longer of value. In order to make these decisions, they must be on intimate terms with the meaning (or, at least, their meaning) of what life is.
Perhaps, then, the distance between medicine and literature starts out very short. One of the first thing doctors learn is how to take notes on their patients, how to compile a history that is succinct, accurate, and useful. In the first year of residency, Kalanithi writes, “one is little more than a paper pusher against a backdrop of life and death.” But as he learned the art of the concise case history, he vowed to treat his “paperwork as patients, and not vice versa.” Because the longer he spent in the hospital, and the more active a role he played in the saving of lives, the easier it became to distance himself from the true meaning of his work: “In the midst of this endless barrage of head injuries, I began to suspect that being so close to the fiery light of such moments only blinded me to their nature, like trying to learn astronomy by staring directly at the sun.”
When Kalanithi finds himself eating an ice cream sandwich as a family mourns the death of their twenty-two-year-old son, he realizes he is in danger of losing his empathy, of becoming the type of doctor more interested in diseases than the people suffering from them. It seems this may be exactly what afflicts many doctors over the course of their careers – either from fatigue, frustration, or the need to avert their eyes from the blazing truth of what they do each day, they move away from the writer-like empathy they started out with, the hypersensitivity to the nature of life. Luckily for us, this doesn’t always happen, and we sometimes get to read wonderful books by doctors like Paul Kalanithi, for whom medicine was an art, a calling, and a gift, just like his memoir.
