"When Breath Becomes Air" by Paul Kalanithi, was published posthumously after his death from cancer.
Dr. Kalanithi was a neurosurgeon who had originally studied literature, took his original degrees as a B.A and M.A of Arts in Literature, before he followed what was obviously the family path into medicine, and after a decade of training as a neurosurgeon, and accepted into a program to study and attain his PhD in neuroscience, that he found out that he had advanced cancer.
This book is really divided into two paths... part 1 is Pre-Cancer with flashforwards, and part 2 is Post-Diagnosis, with flashbacks. The afterword was written by his widowed wife.
The forward was written by his friend and advisor from Stanford, and it is a dedication to Paul. You know going in that there is no silver lining to the clouds that form immediately in the author's life and writing.
The book spent many weeks at the top of the bestseller list, and the author succumbed to his cancer while writing the book. This gives his work a very incomplete feel. I could tell that he was really trying to get all his ideas out onto a page; before his diagnosis he knew he had a few decades of life to get in what he wanted to do, only to be cut short before he turned 40.
The work feels incomplete. Obviously, it is, but there is a dissonance that you don't normally find there. It is similar to The Last Lecture in that regard, but Randy Pausch had more time to complete his work.
For certain-- a book that makes you evaluate what you think you know about how you will handle the end of your days, written by the man looking at both sides of the coin at the same time-- healing and life as a surgeon, and then patient and cancer patient.
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Next up! - The Parasitic Mind - by Gad Saad.
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