When Breath Becomes Air Summary | Chapterly
When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi: A Complete Summary "You can't ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving." Overview When Breath Becomes Air (2016) is the memoir of Paul Kalanithi, a neurosurgeon at Stanford who was diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer at age 36, just as he was completing the final year of his residency. In a single moment, Kalanithi went from being a doctor who treated dying patients to being a dying patient himself. The book is his attempt to answer a question that had preoccupied him since his undergraduate years studying literature: What makes life meaningful in the face of death? This is not a sentimental or inspirational cancer memoir. Kalanithi was a serious writer -- he studied English literature at Stanford and held a master's degree from Cambridge before entering medical school. His prose is precise, honest, and unsentimental. He does not offer easy answers about finding meaning in suffering. Instead, he describes the disorienting experience of having his identity -- doctor, scientist, future professor -- dissolve and the painful work of building a new one. Kalanithi died on March 9, 2015, before finishing the book. His...