On the verge of completing a decade's worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. Just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. Kalanithi chronicles his transformation from a naïve medical student 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.

"The mesmerizing biography of a brilliant and eccentric surgeon and his quest to transplant the human soul. In the early days of the Cold War, a spirit of desperate scientific rivalry birthed a different kind of space race: not the race to outer space that we all know, but a race to master the inner space of the human body. While surgeons on either side of the Iron Curtain competed to become the first to transplant organs like the kidney and heart,...

"A SCIENTIST'S CASE FOR THE AFTERLIFE Near-death experiences, or NDEs, are controversial. Thousands of people have had them, but many in the scientific community have argued that they are impossible. Dr. Eben Alexander was one of those people. A highly trained neurosurgeon who had operated on thousands of brains in the course of his career, Alexander knew that what people of faith call the "soul" is really a product of brain chemistry. NDEs, he would...

The author relates how a chance encounter in a magic shop with a woman who taught him exercises to ease his sufferings and manifest his greatest desires gave him a glimpse of the relationship between the brain and the heart, and drove him to explore the neuroscience of compassion and altruism. With an alcoholic father and a depressed mother Doty's life was at a dead end when, at age twelve, he wandered into a magic shop looking for a plastic thumb....