Summary: When Breath Becomes Air 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.' -- "--Janet Maslin, --USA Today "It's (Kalanithi's) unsentimental approach that makes When Breath Becomes Air ("When Breath Becomes Air From the Hardcover edition