When Breath Becomes Air

Paul Kalanithi

Random House

2016

256 páginas

8h 32m

ISBN-13: 9780812988406

At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve medical student “possessed,” as he wrote, “by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life” into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality.

What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when the future, no longer a ladder toward your goals in life, flattens out into a perpetual present? What does it mean to have a child, to nurture a new life as another fades away? These are some of the questions Kalanithi wrestles with in this profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir.

Paul Kalanithi died in March 2015, while working on this book, yet his words live on as a guide and a gift to us all. “I began to realize that coming face to face with my own mortality, in a sense, had changed nothing and everything,” he wrote. “Seven words from Samuel Beckett began to repeat in my head: ‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on.’” When Breath Becomes Air is an unforgettable, life-affirming reflection on the challenge of facing death and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a brilliant writer who became both.

Resenhas (10)

5 (Perfeito)

Ler o livro do Paul foi uma experiência meio doce e amarga pra mim. Tive que parar várias vezes, respirar fundo e deixar aquilo tudo fluir de verdade. Quando ele falava como médico, às vezes eu esquecia que o cara tava lidando com a própria morte. Aí, do nada, as palavras dele me traziam de volta pra realidade como um tapa na cara. Era uma montanha-russa: uma hora eu tava fascinada com o jeito que ele via as coisas como neurocirurgião, outra hora eu tava completamente arrasada quando ele abria o jogo sobre a dor que tava sentindo. O Paul fala de vida e morte de um jeito que cutuca a gente, sabe? Faz a gente pensar, mas sem tirar o pé da realidade. O livro todo é um baita lembrete pra gente viver a vida de verdade, curtir o agora e não fugir dos papos difíceis. No fim das contas, a gente vê que vida e morte andam juntas mesmo.