Author's Note:
The inspiration (expiration?) for this is the autobiography "When Breath Becomes Air", by Paul Kalanithi. It is a memoir about his life and illness, battling stage IV metastatic lung cancer, recounting his experiences as a doctor and a patient facing a terminal illness.
The book was published posthumously by Random House in 2016.
Before writing his book, Kalanithi was in residency in neurological surgery and a postdoctoral fellowship in neuroscience. In 2013, he was diagnosed with lung cancer. As he underwent cancer treatment, he shared his reflections on illness and medicine, authoring essays in The New York Times, The Paris Review and Stanford Medicine, and participating in interviews for media outlets and public forums.
Kalanithi died in March 2015 at the age of 37.
When Breath Becomes Air is a New York Times bestseller, spending 68 weeks on the non-fiction bestseller list.
Matt McCarthy of USA Today gave it 4 out of 4 stars and said, "It's a story so remarkable, so stunning, and so affecting that I had to take dozens of breaks just to compose myself enough to get through it."
Nick Romeo of The Boston Globe wrote that it, "possesses the gravity and wisdom of an ancient Greek tragedy."
Melissa Maerz of Entertainment Weekly stated that the book was "so original - and so devastating. . . . Its only fault is that the book, like his life, ends much too early."

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