Join the HCSF Reading Group to discuss When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
In-Person Meeting
Sunday, December 7, 2025
4:30-6:00 pm Pacific
In-Person, San Francisco
Address emailed to registrants the week of the meeting
HCSF Members: Free, but RSVP required
Non-Members: $10 Not a member? Register here for membership!
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Registration ends Friday, December 5
When Breath Becomes Air
Paul Kalanithi 228 pages 2016
The catastrophe in this critically-acclaimed memoir reveals itself immediately. In the opening paragraph, Kalanithi, a sixth year Neurosurgery resident, sits before a hospital computer looking at CT scans. He sees lungs “matted with innumerable tumors, the spine deformed, a full lobe of the liver obliterated. Cancer, widely disseminated. I’d examined scores of such scans. But this scan was different. It was my own.” “And with that,” he writes, “the future I had imagined, the one just about to be realized, the culmination of decades of striving, evaporated.” It is spring 2013, he is 36, and Stanford has been courting him for a faculty job. After describing that terrible day, Kalanithi explains how he has reached that moment. Growing up in Kingman, Ariz., he feels no inclination to emulate his cardiologist father, who leaves home at dawn and returns in the dark. What interests Kalanithi is how to formulate a philosophy of life at the intersection of biology, philosophy, and literature. He studies all three, first at Stanford, then at Cambridge. His search leads him to medicine after all. Caring for patients, he decides, offers the best way of exploring “what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.”
Questions about our meetings or how we choose our books?
Contact Kirsten Miclau
HCSF Reading Group Organizer
readinggroup@harvardclubsf.org
Cover image source: Random House