‘When Breath Becomes Air’: How to live, by a doctor who died at 37

This fast-selling memoir by an idealist neurosurgeon facing an early death from cancer gains power and poignancy from its detailed descriptions and reflections on mortality. 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. It brings him back, at last, to the books of poetry he left gathering dust when he entered medical school.

Source: When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi review – how to live, by a doctor who died aged 37