Imagine facing your own mortality at the pinnacle of your career—this is precisely what Paul Kalanithi shares with raw honesty in "When Breath Becomes Air." It's not just a memoir; it's a poignant exploration that delves deep into what makes life meaningful when time is scarce. If you're moved by stories of resilience, of transformation in the hardest of times, this book will touch your heart and, quite possibly, change your perspective on life and death.

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• Pulitzer Prize Nominee for Biography or Autobiography (2017)
• Wellcome Book Prize Nominee (2017)
• Goodreads Choice Award for Memoir & Autobiography (2016)
• Waterstones Book of the Year Nominee (2016)
• Prix Jan Michalski Nominee for Longlist (2017)
• Book of the Month Book of the Year Award Nominee (2016)

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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