How do you describe a book that has had reviews like the following?
- ” Awe-inspiring and exquisite. Obligatory reading.” (Nigella Lawson).
- “Rattling. Heartbreaking. Beautiful.” (Atul Gawande, author of BEING MORTAL).
- “A great, indelible book … I guarantee that finishing this book and then forgetting about it is simply not an option … gripping from the start.” (New York Times).
- “A meditation on what makes a life worth living.” (Guardian)
Paul Kalanithi held degrees in human biology, English Literature, philosophy of science and medicine from Cambridge and Stanford Universities. His medical degree was from Yale University. He won the highest award for research in the field of medicine by the American Academy of Neurological Surgery. After ten years of intense training to be a neurosurgeon, and considered the top student in his class, he was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer, at age 37.
Faced with imminent death, Paul realized: What matters most is not how long, but how, we live.
Being a very competent doctor, he knew clearly how advanced the cancer was. He became clear that two questions matter the most as we face death: (1) Did you lead a meaningful life? (2) Did you make the right choices?
Paul dedicated the book to his daughter Cady, who was eight months old when he died. Asked whether having a child at that stage would not make his taking leave of life more painful, Paul’s answer was: ‘the easiest death wasn’t necessarily the best.’ When medicine could do no more for him, Kalanithi found comfort in literature, e.g., in the words of Samuel Beckett, “I can’t go on. I will go on.” He wrote from his sick bed, and died before he could compete the book: “Words have a longevity I do not.”
Gabriel Weston, an author himself, says, “When I came to the end of the last flawless paragraph of When Breath Becomes Air, all I could do was turn to the first page and read the whole thing again. Searingly intelligent, beautifully written, and beyond brave, I haven’t been so marked by a book in years.”
Much appreciated, too, is the foreword written by a famous doctor-writer, Abraham Verghese.
Others were moved by the epilogue: “It was only with the restrained, elegant epilogue written by his wife Lucy Kalanithi that I found myself weeping helplessly.” (Lucy Kellaway Financial Times)
Another reader, Cheryl Strayed, was so profoundly moved that she wrote: “Paul Kalanithi’s memoir split my head open with its beauty. Truly. Madly. Deeply.”
Despite the dire diagnosis and intense pain, Kalanidhi still infuses his writing with much warmth, love and hope. Here is what a doctor wrote about the book:
“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…That’s because the author is so likeable, so relatable, and so humble, that you become immersed in his world and forget where it’s all heading. It occurs to me, as I close this book again (but not for the final time), that when I’m next on rounds in the hospital, I will have something devastating and spectacular to recommend.” (Matt McCarthy in USA Today)
The book moved this Indian reviewer, Sumit Darmila, deeply: “Tears blur my vision as I attempt to write a review. The foreword by Dr. Abraham Verghese had left me sobbing and so had the following lines: ‘You that seek what life is in death, Now find it air that once was breath.’”
MAGNET recommends this book, because it is “a deeply thoughtful and beautifully written book on the question of what makes life worth living.” (Macmillan Cancer Support)
Paul Kalanithi
Price: Random House/Bodley Head, 2016. 256 pages. $15. Indian price (Amazon.in): Rs 309.
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