When Breath Becomes Air

When Breath Becomes Air is a short memoir recounting Paul Kalanithi’s promising neurosurgery career, and its tragic interruption when he was diagnosed with late-stage lung cancer at the age of 36. Kalanithi’s wise book describes his thoughts and feelings following the diagnosis, and most importantly uses his experience to highlight the need for physicians to learn the skill of empathy: “Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.”