Paul Kalanithi's When Breath Becomes Air

Have you ever wondered what the true meaning of life is? What makes somebody want to live when they are facing the possibility death? When Breath Becomes Air is a heartbreaking story in which the author, Paul Kalanithi, talks about his life while he was dying of stage IV lung cancer. Kalanithi discusses many of his life experiences and how they impacted the way he though about the meaning of life. The book chronicles Kalanithi’s journey from being a medical student, to becoming a neurosurgeon at Stanford University, to becoming a patient diagnosed with a terminal disease, and addresses many philosophical questions, such as the definition of the true meaning of life and what makes life worth living, along the way. There are many reasons why I chose to read When Breath Becomes Air. One reason I decided to read this book was because it sounded thought provoking, and made me think about my own morals and thoughts. During one of the earlier parts of the book, Kalanithi briefly discusses a field trip he and one of his neuroscience classes took to a hospital …show more content…
I find biographies, especially autobiographies, fascinating because you can learn a lot about a person. One thing I learned about Paul Kalanithi was that his mother played a big part in his education. Kalanithi and his family moved from New York to a small town in Arizona named Kingman. Kingman is a town in the middle of the Mojave Dessert with a population of around 28,000 people. Kalanithi went from a school where everybody was getting into prestige colleges and universities, such as Harvard and Yale, to a school where many kids didn’t go to college after high school. His mother noticed that the education system was lacking in many aspects, so she made Kalanithi and his siblings read many books and became part of the Mohave County School Board to help improve the school system for