Book Review | When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. 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.

What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when the future, no longer a ladder toward your goals in life, flattens out into a perpetual present? What does it mean to have a child, to nurture a new life as another fades away? These are some of the questions Kalanithi wrestles with in this profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir.

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For the Reading Challenge(s):
2025 52 Book Club Reading Challenge (Prompt #39: Has an epigraph)

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The Reason

I’ve heard good things about this book and it was a buddy read.

The Quotes

“You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.”

“Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still it is never complete.”

“There is a moment, a cusp, when the sum of gathered experience is worn down by the details of living. We are never so wise as when we live in this moment.”

“I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”

My Thoughts

I thought I could finish this book quickly because it’s not very long, but it felt so heavy that I had a hard time continuing after finishing Part 1. Especially with the way the parts were labeled, knowing that Part 2 we’d be going into his illness. I’ve read several end-of-life memoirs, and honestly this one somehow felt the saddest.

Maybe because it happened so quickly for him, maybe because he was so young… With a lot of the other books, there was more reflection on the good times, good memories, things they learned and achieved, lessons/last words they want to share with others… With this one, Paul seemed to focus more on what he didn’t do, what he wouldn’t ever get to do. I’m not criticizing his thought processes; I think it’s real, it makes sense, and in a way, I like that he’s not romanticizing dying young like he’s some kind of noble, brave, person. It’s unfair, and he never got to do a lot of things that he wanted to do, and there’s nothing romantic about that. Still, it was difficult to read and hit very close to home for me.

I like the book, I like what he had to say, but I also hated reading it because it forced me to look at death and dying in the face, and I would much rather pretend it’s some far away concept that only happens when people live to 100 years old and/or some made-up thing that only happens in books and movies.

I’m also somewhat getting an existential crisis from reading this; what’s important to me? have I achieved what I want to achieve in life? am I living life the way I want to? if I only had a few years to live, what should I be doing? what do I want to be doing? I have so much compassion for Paul and his family, and I love that even in the midst of his own illness, he’s thinking of his wife and child, what she’s going through dealing with his illness, wanting her to remarry. I am feeling so many feelings right now…

My Rating

⭐⭐⭐⭐/5 stars.

Have you read this book? Would you read this book? Did you like the book or do you think you would like it?