When Breath Becomes Air

What it's about

At thirty-six, Paul Kalanithi was about to finish a decade of training as a neurosurgeon at Stanford when he was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying; the next he was a patient trying to live. Written in the time he had left, this is his story of the questions that drew him to medicine (what makes a life meaningful when every life ends?) and of facing them himself, as a husband, a surgeon and a new father.

Why it's worth reading

It's a short, luminous book about mortality that somehow leaves readers feeling more alive. Kalanithi writes with a surgeon's precision and a poet's sense of wonder.

You'll love it if you liked

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, Educated or The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

Good to know

Kalanithi died before he could finish it; his wife Lucy's epilogue completes the story. It's under 250 pages, and many people read it in one sitting.