When Breath Becomes Air(Round 5)

Book Update

    The book I am writing about today is When Breath Becomes Air, by Paul Kalanithi. I have finished reading the book.

Subject

    I really enjoyed the topic of this book. It is definitely a very heavy topic to write about. The author did a great job of presenting the material and illustrating their point. He really showed how he went from being in perfect health as a neurosurgery resident and telling his patients about their severe illnesses to becoming a patient with terminal illness himself. However, the writing was unnecessarily dense and hard to read sometimes. I agree with what the author said about not being worth it to save a patient from death only to have them paralyzed without full brain function. The value this book has for society is to help people make peace with death and perhaps understand cancer a little. What I think should be changed is that they should have added a couple more chapters with his wife Lucy's point of view. The last chapter is written by her because he was unable to finish the book. She talks about his final stages of death and what happened after, but I would have also liked to see what she was thinking during the process of his diagnosis and treatment.

Audience

    It would be hard to say something in opposition to this book, because there is nothing really to oppose. The book doesn't really have opinions on a certain subject. It's more of a memoir of his life and ideas about life and death mixed in there.

Purpose

    I think the author achieved their purpose in writing this book. He wanted to inform people about his story and battle with lung cancer, and he succeeded. He also wanted to help people face their mortality, and he succeeded in that too. In college, he pondered the question, "What makes life worth living?", and he answered that through this book. The relationships he made, his daughter, his fierce battle against cancer, all made his life meaningful.
Speaker

    I would ask the author(if he was still alive) how he stayed relatively calm, or so it appeared even after the realization that death could be near. If I were to write about this book, I would applaud the author for being able to write such a clear, focused memoir that preserves his life and personality even after he is gone. Much of this book, he wrote while experiencing pain, nausea, and fatigue, and it is amazing how determined he was to finish the book. The book itself is also quite engaging, and he uses just the right amount of medical terminology.