This book was a quite old one, got released on 2017 but now I got the time to read this title. The book was in one of my wish list. People who worked with me for a long time know, I fear only for time. Nothing else. It has a power to change things drastically in seconds. So my advise to all, is always respect TIME. Its IMMUTABLE.
Paul Kalanithi was a brilliant neurosurgeon who, in a cruel twist of fate, got diagnosed with terminal lung cancer in his mid-thirties. When Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with terminal cancer, he was on the verge of making big contributions to the world with his mind and hands. He was a gifted doctor—a chief resident in neurosurgery at Stanford just months away from completing the most grueling training of any clinical field. He was also a brilliant scientist. His postdoctoral research on gene therapy won him his field’s highest research award.
As if that wasn’t enough, he was also a great writer. Before attending medical school, he earned two degrees in English literature from Stanford and gave serious consideration to pursuing writing as a full-time career.
Just when he’s on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training, life throws him this curveball. The book is his journey of navigating this heart-wrenching irony.
Kalanithi’s writing is beautiful. He dives into what makes life meaningful, especially when time is running out. As a doctor, he was used to being the one giving the news, not receiving it. He reflects on his role reversal, from doctor to patient, and how it reshapes his understanding of life, death, and identity.
While it’s a book about dying, it’s really about how to live. It’s about finding purpose, love, and joy, no matter the hand you’re dealt.
For one thing, I thoroughly enjoyed Kalanithi’s stories about his surgical training. I’ve always admired doctors. They have to make impossibly hard decisions, and so much of their work has life-and-death implications. Kalanithi illustrates these high stakes well, without sounding like he has a God complex.
Kalanithi is part of a fraternity of amazing writer doctors, including Abraham Verghese, Siddhartha Mukherjee, and Atul Gawande. Perhaps I should consult a neuroscientist to figure out whether these seemingly disparate talents are somehow linked in the brain.
I am certain I will read When Breath Becomes Air again. This short book has so many layers of meaning and so many interesting juxtapositions—life and death, patient and doctor, son and father, work and family, faith and reason—I know I’ll pick up more insights the second time around.
I don’t know how Kalanithi found the physical strength to write this book while he was so debilitated by the disease and then potent chemotherapy. But I’m so glad he did. He spent his whole brief life searching for meaning in one way or another—through books, writing, medicine, surgery, and science.
My favorite parts from the book —
“You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.”
“Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still it is never complete.”
“There is a moment, a cusp, when the sum of gathered experience is worn down by the details of living. We are never so wise as when we live in this moment.”
“I began to realize that coming in such close contact with my own mortality had changed both nothing and everything. Before my cancer was diagnosed, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. After the diagnosis, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. But now I knew it acutely. The problem wasn’t really a scientific one. The fact of death is unsettling. Yet there is no other way to live.”
댓글