When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi review – how to live, by a doctor who died aged 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 final chapter: why we can’t stop reading books by those who are dying

This book, already a bestseller in the United States, opens with a trainee surgeon examining a set of images from a CT scan. His highly trained eye takes in how the tumours are dispersed across the lungs, how the spine is deformed, how one lobe of the liver has been obliterated. The diagnosis is straightforward: “Cancer, widely disseminated.” Only one thing makes this case different from the dozens he deals with each week: these are scans of his own body.

The doctor in question was Paul Kalanithi, who discovered he had inoperable lung cancer at the age of 36. The cliche about someone having everything to live for could have been formulated for him: he was on the verge of qualifying as a neurosurgeon after a decade of training, and was planning to start a family with his wife, Lucy. Instead, he found himself confronting not only a terminal illness, but also a profound identity crisis: having aspired to be “the pastoral figure … I found myself the sheep, lost and confused”. This account of his transition from doctor to patient was written in the year or so prior to his death early last year, by which time he was 37 and his daughter, Cady, was nine months old.

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