#10 in Biography & memoir
When Breath Becomes Air
- 232
- Pages
- about 4.5 h
- Reading time
- NYT bestseller · 66 weeks on the list, peaked at #1
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Our view
“When Breath Becomes Air” draws its strength from a double view: a neurosurgeon writes as a doctor and as a patient with lung cancer. Kalanithi shows how easily medicine loses sight of the person, and what it looks like when a doctor refuses to. The prose is beautiful. Published after his death, it is a short book and a heavy one, best read when one is ready to think about mortality.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
When Breath Becomes Air is a non-fiction autobiographical book written by American neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi. It is a memoir about his life and battling stage IV metastatic lung cancer. It was posthumously published by Random House on January 12, 2016.
Where the score comes from
The sources average 8.7 across 1,012 ratings. With that many, the reader vote carries 87% of the weight and the score stays at 8.6 — the Biography & memoir average of 8.1 barely moves it.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 8.5 | 42 | 4% |
| Hardcover | 8.7 | 970 | 96% |
Frequently asked
How long is When Breath Becomes Air?
It has 232 pages — shorter than 81% of the ranked books in Biography & memoir.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
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