Review: When Breath Becomes Air

When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Gorgeously written, a shimmer over the sentences, this surgeon was as handy with the word as he is with the scalpel. It's a difficult read in that it forced me to confront the ever present death lurking behind every corner, this life could be taken away with the next breath. Kalanithi is erudite and eloquent, peels back the covers on his own dying experience as it intersects with being inside the medicine. His account of being "outside" the profession as a patient is moving and scary because in some sense, this is all of us he writes about. It's not just his experience but that of humanity. Loved this autobiography written as literature, as memoir and part educated musings. It's deceptively dense, both stylistically and content-wise.

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