When Breath Becomes Air
He spent his career saving lives and then learned he had very little time left. What he wrote about that is one of the finest things in medical literature.
The Time That Remains
Paul Kalanithi was a brilliant neurosurgeon at Stanford completing his residency when he was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer at thirty-six. Rather than simply endure, he returned to his earlier love of literature and began writing a memoir asking the question he had spent his career deflecting: what makes life worth living when you know how little of it remains? He died in March 2015, months before publication. His wife Lucy Kalanithi wrote the epilogue. The memoir debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list and has sold millions of copies worldwide.
Reading When Breath Becomes Air
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"You can't ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.
"Paul Kalanithi
Kalanithi wrote the book on a laptop in hospital between treatments and surgeries. He submitted the final manuscript to his editor ten days before he died. The book was published posthumously in January 2016.
Kalanithi was accepted to both Stanford Medical School and a PhD programme in literature at Stanford simultaneously. He chose medicine. The memoir demonstrates that the choice was, in the end, unnecessary.