Saturday, January 23, 2016

The final chapter: Paul Kalanithi and why we can't stop reading books by those who are dying

The late surgeon Paul Kalanithi’s book is set to shoot into the bestseller charts, making him the latest in a long line of writers to examine their feelings as their lives are prematurely curtailed


Paul Kalanithi: the brilliant neurosurgeon who died of lung cancer last year, aged 36.
Paul Kalanithi: the brilliant neurosurgeon who died of lung cancer last year, aged 36. Photograph: paulkalanithi.com
Paul Kalanithi was a successful, brilliant almost-neurosurgeon about to graduate from his residency when he was diagnosed with lung cancer at the age of 36. “And with that, the future I had imagined, the one just about to be realized, the culmination of decades of striving, evaporated,” he writes.

A little less than two years later, he was dead. A little less than three years later, Random House has published his memoir, When Breath Became Air, cobbled together from a variety of sources. To say that it has been greeted with praise is rather understating it. “I guarantee that finishing this book and then forgetting about it is simply not an option,” the New York Times raved.
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