When Breath Becomes Air Book Summary

Book Summary

15 min

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Brief Summary

Kalanithi’s book explores the dramatic ups-and-downs of individual life and the contradictions within. Doctors eventually become patients and everybody deals with death. Kalanithi explains that this struggle does not have to be without meaning, and that meaning can be found in our work, our passions, and time spent with loved ones. Meaning can also be found in the pursuit of science, medicine, philosophy, literature, and in the midst of terrible experiences. Kalanithi’s story explores the sudden cruelty of some lives and the importance of acceptance and preparation for our deaths. He advocates for increased awareness around end-of-life planning and care, for doctors and patients alike, and a reevaluation of our priorities after understanding the inevitability of death. To doctors, Kalanithi expresses the importance of holistic care, considering the various human aspects of a person’s life. Work and lifestyle should be considered and preserved when deciding on treatment. Kalani’s story also reveals that as life shortens, time becomes treasured— life is short, fleeting, and therefore precious.

About the Author

Paul Kalanithi was an Indian-American neurosurgeon, neuroscientist, and writer. He grew up in Westchester, New York to a Christian family and attended Stanford University. After Stanford, he graduated from the University of Cambridge with a degree in the History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine. He then attended medical school at Yale School of Medicine before continuing to a residency at Stanford School of Medicine. There, he met his wife Lucy Goddard. He had a child, Elizabeth Acadia before his death. Before his death, he wrote various essays for The New York Times, Stanford Medicine Magazine, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review.

Topics

Biography & Memoir

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Key Insights

This memoir follows Paul Kalanithi through his development into a doctor and then through his tragic turn into a terminally ill patient. Kalanithi writes about how his love for literature shaped him into someone interested in the questions of meaning, morality, and humanity while his work brought him close to life and death. The story explores one man’s experiences with the ethical difficulties of the medical profession, the search for meaning, and the fragility of life.

Literature offers a way to explore life’s meaning and to relate the mind’s struggle with the concepts of life and death. Often, literature shows us that meaning comes from relationships.

Paul Kalanithi never planned on becoming a doctor had come from a family where his father worked long hours in the profession. He instead fell in love with the books given to him by his mother. He idolized authors like Orwell, Poe, TS Eliot, Camus, and Thoreau, and wanted to follow in their footsteps and become a writer. In these books, Kalanithi found answers to and explorations of life’s big questions and a place for the mind to relate its existential struggles. He particularly likes TS Eliot’s The Wasteland and its exploration of meaninglessness in isolation; he found in many of his books that meaning seemed to arise through interpersonal relationships. In college, Kalanithi continued his pursuit with a degree in English Literature alongside his degree in biology.

Throughout the book, Kalanithi returns to his love for literature which sparked his interest in the questions of life and death and what makes for a beautiful and meaningful time in between. He ends his life as he started it: wanting to write and capture the way his mind dealt with impending death. In the end, his wish to become a published author came true, though only after he passed away. His book shows that stories can document existential struggles and help others understand how to cope with these difficult subjects and experiences.

Studying the body offers insight into how the mind shapes our life. This is another avenue to exploring how meaning arises and how our determined by the state of our bodies.

In college, Kalanithi studied Biology alongside English. He became fascinated with biological processes after reading Satan: His Psychotherapy and Cure, a book that exposed him to the brain’s role as the organ that allows the mind to exist. By studying the laws of the brain he could understand how people became capable or incapable of forming relationships. Kalanithi realized he could look to both literature and neuroscience for answers to questions about the mind’s search for meaning.

Throughout his time as a neurosurgeon, he found that those with permanent brain injuries struggle to make and maintain relationships. In one instance, a boy he operated on had his hypothalamus damaged, a part of his brain that controlled certain impulses. This brain damage induced violent and difficult behavior, leading him to become institutionalized and isolated from other people.

Kalanithi also experienced first hand the way the state of the body...