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ST Medical Monday: "When Breath Becomes Air"

Aired on Monday, October 9th.

On this edition of our program, we speak with the California-based physician and writer Lucy Kalanithi. Her late husband Paul, also a physician, wrote the bestselling memoir, "When Breath Becomes Air," in the final months of his life. (He died of lung cancer before his 40th birthday.) As was noted of this short yet powerful book by The Boston Globe: "Paul Kalanithi's posthumous memoir...possesses the gravity and wisdom of an ancient Greek tragedy.... [Kalanithi] delivers his chronicle in austere, beautiful prose. The book brims with insightful reflections on mortality that are especially poignant coming from a trained physician familiar with what lies ahead.... The narrative voice is so assured and powerful that you almost expect him to survive his own death and carry on describing what happened to his friends and family after he is gone." Please note that Lucy Kalanithi will appear in Tulsa a week from tonight (on the 16th; at 7pm) for a reading and signing at TU's Lorton Performance Center.

Rich Fisher passed through KWGS about thirty years ago, and just never left. Today, he is the general manager of Public Radio Tulsa, and the host of KWGS’s public affairs program, StudioTulsa, which celebrated its twentieth anniversary in August 2012 . As host of StudioTulsa, Rich has conducted roughly four thousand long-form interviews with local, national, and international figures in the arts, humanities, sciences, and government. Very few interviews have gone smoothly. Despite this, he has been honored for his work by several organizations including the Governor's Arts Award for Media by the State Arts Council, a Harwelden Award from the Arts & Humanities Council of Tulsa, and was named one of the “99 Great Things About Oklahoma” in 2000 by Oklahoma Today magazine.
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