Slate's audiobook club is brought to you by Fun Home, winner of five Tony Awards, including Best Musical.

The Associated Press calls this groundbreaking production, the best of what Broadway can do.

Get tickets at funhomebroadway.com.

And by Audible.com, with more than 180,000 audiobooks and spoken word audio products.

Get a free 30-day trial and a free audiobook at audible podcast.com slash slate ABC.

Hello and welcome to this month's installment of the Slate Audio Book Club,

where a rotating cast of critics discusses the books on everyone's minds.

I'm your host, Katie Waldman, the words correspondent at Slate,

and I'm joined today by Megyn O'Rourke, writer and critic for many places, including Slate. Hi, Megan. Hi. And also by Parol Seigle of the New York Times Book Review and the New York Times Magazine. Hello. Hey, Katie. We've got a great show for you today. We'll be discussing When Breath Becomes Air by Paul

Kalanithi, the memoir of a neurosurgeon who received a terminal cancer diagnosis at 36. In this graceful

learned and moving book, Kalanithi charts his journey from doctor to patient and seeks out an

understanding of what makes a virtuous, meaningful life. I should mention that he died in March of

2015. His book has since become a bestseller, with an epilogue by his wife, Lucy, and a foreword by

the writer and doctor Abraham Verges. Something that surprised me about when Breath Becomes

Air was the extent to which it was a textbook or an educational text.

It delivered at least two types of knowledge.

It straightforwardly told me things I didn't know, such as the fact that there is a verb,

Burke for killing someone so that you can sell the body to medical students for dissection.

And it made real and present things that I knew intellectually but had not entirely assimilated

or appreciated

with my whole being, such as the fact of mortality. So I thought it might be fun to start with

each of us saying one thing this book taught us that we didn't really know or comprehend before.

...