Thomas Laqueur Review in London Review of Books

October 4th, 2016  |  Published in Latest news

Thomas Laqueur wrote a review for the London Review of Books on Paul Kalanithi’s book When Breath Becomes Air. 

“Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air was published in the US in January to critical and popular acclaim. There had already been ‘an overwhelming response, an outpouring from readers’, to an article Kalanithi published in the New York Times 14 months before he died, on 9 March 2015, and eight months after being diagnosed with lung cancer at the age of 36. That essay, ‘How Long Have I Got Left?’, Abraham Verghese writes in his foreword to this book, ‘was simply stunning. The prose was unforgettable.’ The book itself had much the same effect. ‘There was an honesty, a truth of writing, that took my breath away. Be ready. Be seated,’ Verghese warns. Janet Maslin wrote in the New York Times that ‘to read this book is to feel that Dr Kalanithi still lives, with enormous power to influence the lives of others though he is gone’. ‘Unmissable.’ The New Yorker called it ‘a manifesto for the genre’. Pathography seems to have reached its exemplary form and its public apotheosis.”

See the rest of the review here.

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