An elegantly crafted and moving memoir about a neurosurgeon's journey to pinpoint the meaning of life, on a general and personal scale, after receiving a diagnosis of lung cancer, When Breath Becomes Air is a great philosophical read but distracts itself away from the central story of a young man's acceptance of his shortened mortality. 
 Kalanithi devoured great literary classics before he even graduated from high school and obtained a Master's in English literature. Those literary influences are very prevalent in his writing, as is his love for poetry. The writing contains an easy, lyrical quality about it that can often make simple points seem more profound by the beauty with which he crafts his sentences. 
 But even though I enjoyed his philosophical journey into discovering the meaning of life, how one's job perspective can change one's perception of mortality, and how that all fits into how a family accepts and deals with the death of a loved one, I found the purely biographical parts to be more compelling. Depictions of his youth, his mother's emotional quest to ensure her sons received a proper education in a region rated as having the worst educational prospects, his time as a medical student and resident were all fraught with deeply personal and touching revelations into his life and humanity. In particular, I thought his realization that the fraught and busy nature of medical studies turned him into an unfeeling, box-checking automaton trying to complete his duties as quickly as possible (as compared with the same treatment to him by a junior resident during his illness), and his transformation into a doctor who acknowledges and respects the purpose of patient-doctor interaction should be required reading for any medical student. I don't care if the best doctors are supposed to be the coldest ones who don't care about your prognosis, and if a patient's worries and cares are silly and meaningless - have a little humanity, if possible. 
 Interspersed with these accounts were no less important discussions of life, but I honestly thought these distracted and slightly detracted from the overall story. 
 Still, Kalanithi's memoir is worth reading, from the foreword, where you learn (if you hadn't bothered fully reading the summary, like me) that the author predeceased the book's publishing, to Kalanithi's touching address to his infant daughter, to the beautifully crafted and loving epilogue, written by Kalanithi's wife.