At the age of 36, 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*. This book records Kalanithi’s transformation from a naive 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 facing his own death.

    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 struggles with in this moving, exquisitely observed memoir*.

    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.”

    This is an unforgettable, life-affirming reflection on the challenge of facing death and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a writer who became both.

    The book is available at online bookstores like jd.com and amazon.cn.(SD-Agencies)