Minding our Mortality Book Club provides opportunities for conversations and connections around topics of death, mortality and grief through selected readings and quarterly gatherings.

For our May Book Club meetup, we will be discussing When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi.

A brief description of the Pulitzer Prize finalist memoir is excerpted from Goodreads below:

At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. "When Breath Becomes Air" chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve medical student “possessed,” as he wrote, “by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life” into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality.