8.6 /10 1 Votes
4.3/5 Book Depository | 4.3/5 Goodreads Originally published 12 January 2016 Original language English | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Awards Goodreads Choice Awards Best Memoir & Autobiography Similar My Name Is Lucy Barton, Hillbilly Elegy, Being Mortal: Medicine, Barkskins, Lab Girl | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
When Breath Becomes Air is a non-fiction autobiographical book written by Paul Kalanithi. It is a memoir about his life and illness, battling stage IV metastatic lung cancer. It was posthumously published by Random House on January 12, 2016.
Contents
When breath becomes air by paul kalanithi trailer
Background
Before writing When Breath Becomes Air, Paul Kalanithi was in residency in neurological surgery and a postdoctoral fellowship in neuroscience. In May 2013, Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage-4 non-small-cell EGFR-positive lung cancer.
As Kalanithi underwent cancer treatment, he shared his reflections on illness and medicine, authoring essays in The New York Times, The Paris Review and Stanford Medicine, and participating in interviews for media outlets and public forums. He also began work on an autobiographical book of his experiences as a doctor and a patient facing a terminal illness.
Paul died in March 2015 at the age of 37. His memoir was published posthumously 10 months later. The book included a Foreword by Dr. Abraham Verghese and an Epilogue by Kalanithi’s wife, Lucy.
Plot Summary
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.
Reception
When Breath Becomes Air is a New York Times bestseller. As of February, 2017, it is has been on the bestseller list for 51 weeks.
Matt McCarthy of USA TODAY gave it 4 out of 4 stars and said, "It's a story so remarkable, so stunning, and so affecting that I had to take dozens of breaks just to compose myself enough to get through it." Nick Romeo of The Boston Globe wrote that it, "possesses the gravity and wisdom of an ancient Greek tragedy." Melissa Maerz of Entertainment Weekly stated that the book was, "so original—and so devastating. . . . Its only fault is that the book, like his life, ends much too early."
Awards
It was awarded the Goodreads Choice Awards 2016 for Best Memoir and Autobiography.
Other Editions
The first US English edition was released in January 2016 followed by the UK English hardback edition by Bodley Head in February 2016. A UK paperback edition was released on January 5, 2017. The book has since been translated and published in 31 other languages with 10 more languages in the works.
In the works
Translations are also underway in Arabic, Bulgarian, Croatian, Greek, Kannada, Mongolian, and Vietnamese.