Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

What Do I Have in Common With a Neurosurgeon?

When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

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As a cancer patient, myself, I approached this book with a measure of caution. I knew I would enjoy the clinical stuff because that’s always interesting. But I was scared about the inevitable ending. I expected it to strike a particularly raw nerve, and it did. But before we get into that, I want to say this. Paul Kalanithi was an incredible human being. That he was able to eloquently pen such a truthful book in the last remaining days of his life is awe […]

I’m not crying, you’re crying.

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This was the first book I read this year way back in January, and I had just had my daughter (she turns one this week!) and it really just gave me a lot of feelings, and I didn’t know how to write them all in a book review, so I put it off to “let it settle” and whoooooops now it’s December!  Hi guys! This is a feelings book. It is grim, but it is also optimistic and lovely and hopeful. Kalanthi was 36 and […]

Backlog #CBRBingo

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According to Goodreads I shelved When Breath Becomes Air on December 6, 2016 so it is a pretty clear choice for the Backlog bingo square. “What makes life meaningful enough to go on living?” Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer at the age of thirty-six just as he was completing his decade’s long training to be a neurosurgeon. He had felt for months he may have cancer but put off getting any scans done until his back pain became unbearable. Paul had […]

The end of the beginning

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When this book first came out, a friend of mine texted me and told me I had to read it. I dutifully added to my TBR list, but privately I thought I’d never get around to it. I couldn’t imagine ever being in a mood where I’d want to read the memoir of a man who died of cancer in his 30s. I work in direct service, and it’s a convenient excuse to get out of a lot of “sad” things. I see real life […]

At Least the Baby Doesn’t Die

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It’s a darned good thing I have cold — the kind where your eyes water and your sinuses itch — because at least I can blame my now-puffy eyes on that instead of the fact that When Breath Becomes Air, by Paul Kalanithi, made me cry like a kid. Paul is — was — a talented neurosurgeon who found out he had cancer at the tail-end of his residency at Stanford.  Because cutting on people eventually gets to be out of the question when you’re terminally […]

I finished this book, exhaled, and flipped it over to the beginning again.

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Reading the late Paul Kalanithi’s spectacular memoir When Breath Becomes Air, a meditation about love, literature and science in the face of a terminal cancer diagnosis was a strange experience “The good news is that I’ve already outlived two Brontes, Keats and Stephen Crane,” Kalanithi wrote to a friend. “The bad news is that I haven’t written anything.” He was trying to be funny, using the kind of dark humor you get from people facing the unfaceable. But it also revealed Kalanithi’s tremendous ambition. He […]



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