Book Review: When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
Even if you don’t love nonfiction, you’ll love When Breath Becomes Air (and my review for it ;)). Full of emotion, heart, and science vs. real life, this book is sure to pull at your heart strings. It’s written more like fiction in my opinion than nonfiction, which is probably why I loved it!
Book Information
Paul Kalanithi has so much talent and promise. He is a budding neurosurgeon, brightest in his class, able to get almost any position that he wants from wherever he wants. His life’s goal is to find out what makes human life meaningful. All of that is put on hold, however, when he is diagnosed with cancer.
Review | Heidi Dischler
I am not usually the nonfiction type of person. I don’t read memoirs or biographies or histories. Someone recommended this book to me, though, and I felt the large, unretractable urge to read it. Something about its title brought me in. When Breath Becomes Air. Maybe it’s because of the fact that I have asthma, so the semblance of not being able to breathe really speaks to me. Whatever it was, I am so glad that I decided to read it.
Paul’s life began with the question that many of us have: what makes life meaningful? He started in English and then went into med school, which is the opposite of how I ended up (I started as a premed major and finished in English). He wrote so compassionately about everything that he had experienced. His emotions and language and heart really touched me.
Spoilers ahead.
There are several specific things that I want to talk about from this book. One was when he was in the cadaver lab in med school. That scene stuck with me through the whole book maybe because I once wanted to be there with them. But the humanity behind the person, even when their dead, stayed with Paul and his fellow classmates. I can’t help thinking that I would feel the same way. You have to cover your cadaver’s face because it’s easier that way. Because you don’t see their humanity. That part kind of just broke my heart because I feel like so many people don’t understand the weight of human life.
The second thing that I wanted to mention here was the utterly profound amount of compassion in this novel. The compassion from Paul when he says that “nobody has it coming.” The compassion from Emma as she treats him, personally putting herself into his case, which I can only imagine makes treating people that much harder. The compassion that almost all doctors must have to look at a living person, to know that person, only to watch them die later.
If you couldn’t tell already, this book is very morbid, but it is so profound and important. I would recommend it to anyone who wants to see the meaning in life, and who wants to see how very important human life is. Paul didn’t survive his diagnosis, but in my opinion, he still beat cancer because he didn’t let it break him.
Source: Personal Copy
Thanks for the review! Might I recommend another great book on humanity and not letting circumstance squelch hope? Viktor E. Frankl’s autobiography, “Man’s Search for Meaning” will certainly fill that need.