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Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life's Greatest Lesson (Paperback)
by Mitch Albom
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| MSL Pointer Review:
“once you learn how to die, you learn how to live.” - This book teaches us to live life to the fullest. Take the time to connect with those you love. Be observant with your surrounding and pay attention to the little details. |
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Author: Mitch Albom
Publisher: Anchor; Reprint edition
Pub. in: December, 2005
ISBN: 0307275639
Pages: 208
Measurements: 6.7 x 4.1 x 0.9 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BC00337
Other information: ISBN-13: 978-0307275639
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- Awards & Credential -
Despite the obvious charm and good nature of both author and subject, in the end, the exhortations fall flat. Just as a well-meaning statement like "We should all live in peace" doesn't help avert wars, Tuesdays with Morrie finally fails to enlighten. - The New York Times Book Review |
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- MSL Picks -
Maybe it was a grandparent, or a teacher, or a colleague.Someone older, patient and wise, who understood you when you were young and searching, helped you see the world as a more profound place, gave you sound advice to help you make your way through it.
For Mitch Albom, that person was Morrie Schwartz, his college professor from nearly twenty years ago.
Maybe, like Mitch, you lost track of this mentor as you made your way, and the insights faded, and the world seemed colder.Wouldn't you like to see that person again, ask the bigger questions that still haunt you, receive wisdom for your busy life today the way you once did when you were younger?
Mitch Albom had that second chance.He rediscovered Morrie in the last months of the older man's life.Knowing he was dying, Morrie visited with Mitch in his study every Tuesday, just as they used to back in college.Their rekindled relationship turned into one final "class": lessons in how to live.
Tuesdays with Morrie is a magical chronicle of their time together, through which Mitch shares Morrie's lasting gift with the world.
(From quoting The Publisher)
Target readers:
Teens, young adults.
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Mitch Albom is the author of nine books, including the newest, For One More Day, published 9/26/06. His first novel, The Five People You Meet in Heaven, (9/03) is the most successful U.S. hardback first novel ever and has to date sold over 8 million copies worldwide Tuesdays With Morrie, (1997) his chronicle of time spent with a beloved but dying college professor, spent four years on the NY Times bestsellers list and is now the most successful memoir ever published. Both books were eventually turned into celebrated TV films. The critically acclaimed Five People You Meet in Heaven aired on ABC in winter, 2004. Oprah Winfrey produced the film version of Tuesdays With Morrie in December 1999; starring Jack Lemmon and Hank Azaria. The film garnered four Emmy awards, including best TV film, director, actor and supporting actor.
An award-winning journalist and radio host, Albom wrote the screenplay for The Five People You Meet in Heaven, and is an established playwright, having authored numerous pieces for the theater, including the off-Broadway version of Tuesdays With Morrie (co-written with Jeffrey Hatcher) which has seen more than 40 productions nationwide, and several recent comedies which have been produced and performed in venues across the country.
Albom has founded three charities in the metropolitan Detroit area: The Dream Fund, established in 1989, allows disadvantaged children to become involved with the arts. "A Time To Help," founded in 1998, brings volunteers together once a month to tackle various projects in Detroit, including staffing shelters, building homes with Habitat for Humanity, and operating meals on wheels programs for the elderly. S.A.Y Detroit, Albom’s most recent effort, is an umbrella program to fund shelters and care for the homeless in his city. He also raises money for literacy projects through a variety of means including his performances with The Rock Bottom Remainders, a band made up of writers which includes Steven King, Dave Barry, Scott Turrow, Amy Tan and Ridley Pearson. Albom serves on the boards of various charities and, in 1999, was named National Hospice Organization's Man of the Year.
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From Kirkus Reviews
Award-winning sportswriter Albom was a student at Brandeis University, some two decades ago, of sociologist Morrie Schwartz. Here Albom recounts how, recently, as the old man was dying, he renewed his warm relationship with his revered mentor. This is the vivid record of the teacher's battle with muscle- wasting amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's disease. The dying man, largely because of his life-affirming attitude toward his death-dealing illness, became a sort of thanatopic guru, and was the subject of three Ted Koppel interviews on Nightline. That was how the author first learned of Morrie's condition. Albom well fulfilled the age-old obligation to visit the sick. He calls his weekly visits to his teacher his last class, and the present book a term paper. The subject: The Meaning of Life. Unfortunately, but surely not surprisingly, those relying on this text will not actually learn The Meaning of Life here. Albom does not present a full transcript of the regular Tuesday talks. Rather, he expands a little on the professor's aphorisms, which are, to be sure, unassailable. ''Love is the only rational act,'' Morrie said. ''Love each other or perish,'' he warned, quoting Auden. Albom learned well the teaching that ``death ends a life, not a relationship.'' The love between the old man and the younger one is manifest. This book, small and easily digested, stopping just short of the maudlin and the mawkish, is on the whole sincere, sentimental, and skillful. (The substantial costs of Morrie's last illness, Albom tells us, were partly defrayed by the publisher's advance). Place it under the heading ''Inspirational.'' ''Death,'' said Morrie, ''is as natural as life. It's part of the deal we made.'' If that is so (and it's not a notion quickly gainsaid), this book could well have been called ``The Art of the Deal.''
(MSL quote)
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The Curriculum
The last class of my old professor's life took place once a week in his house, by a window in the study where he could watch a small hibiscus plant shed its pink leaves. The class met on Tuesdays. It began after breakfast. The subject was The Meaning of Life. It was taught from experience.
No grades were given, but there were oral exams each week. You were expected to respond to questions, and you were expected to pose questions of your own. You were also required to perform physical tasks now and then, such as lifting the professor's head to a comfortable spot on the pillow or placing his glasses on the bridge of his nose. Kissing him good-bye earned you extra credit.
No books were required, yet many topics were covered, including love, work, community, family, aging, forgiveness, and, finally, death. The last lecture was brief, only a few words.
A funeral was held in lieu of graduation.
Although no final exam was given, you were expected to produce one long paper on what was learned. That paper is presented here.
The last class of my old professor's life had only one student.
I was the student.
It is the late spring of 1979, a hot, sticky Saturday afternoon. Hundreds of us sit together, side by side, in rows of wooden folding chairs on the main campus lawn. We wear blue nylon robes. We listen impatiently to long speeches. When the ceremony is over, we throw our caps in the air, and we are officially graduated from college, the senior class of Brandeis University in the city of Waltham, Massachusetts. For many of us, the curtain has just come down on childhood.
Afterward, I find Morrie Schwartz, my favorite professor, and introduce him to my parents. He is a small man who takes small steps, as if a strong wind could, at any time, whisk him up into the clouds. In his graduation day robe, he looks like a cross between a biblical prophet and a Christmas elf. He has sparkling blue-green eyes, thinning silver hair that spills onto his forehead, big ears, a triangular nose, and tufts of graying eyebrows. Although his teeth are crooked and his lower ones are slanted back--as if someone had once punched them in--when he smiles it's as if you'd just told him the first joke on earth.
He tells my parents how I took every class he taught. He tells them, "You have a special boy here." Embarrassed, I look at my feet. Before we leave, I hand my professor a present, a tan briefcase with his initials on the front. I bought this the day before at a shopping mall. I didn't want to forget him. Maybe I didn't want him to forget me.
"Mitch, you are one of the good ones," he says, admiring the briefcase. Then he hugs me. I feel his thin arms around my back. I am taller than he is, and when he holds me, I feel awkward, older, as if I were the parent and he were the child.
He asks if I will stay in touch, and without hesitation I say, "Of course."
When he steps back, I see that he is crying.
The Syllabus
His death sentence came in the summer of 1994. Looking back, Morrie knew something bad was coming long before that. He knew it the day he gave up dancing.
He had always been a dancer, my old professor. The music didn't matter. Rock and roll, big band, the blues. He loved them all. He would close his eyes and with a blissful smile begin to move to his own sense of rhythm. It wasn't always pretty. But then, he didn't worry about a partner. Morrie danced by himself.
He used to go to this church in Harvard Square every Wednesday night for something called "Dance Free." They had flashing lights and booming speakers and Morrie would wander in among the mostly student crowd, wearing a white T-shirt and black sweatpants and a towel around his neck, and whatever music was playing, that's the music to which he danced. He'd do the lindy to Jimi Hendrix. He twisted and twirled, he waved his arms like a conductor on amphetamines, until sweat was dripping down the middle of his back. No one there knew he was a prominent doctor of sociology, with years of experience as a college professor and several well-respected books. They just thought he was some old nut.
Once, he brought a tango tape and got them to play it over the speakers. Then he commandeered the floor, shooting back and forth like some hot Latin lover. When he finished, everyone applauded. He could have stayed in that moment forever.
But then the dancing stopped.
He developed asthma in his sixties. His breathing became labored. One day he was walking along the Charles River, and a cold burst of wind left him choking for air. He was rushed to the hospital and injected with Adrenalin.
A few years later, he began to have trouble walking. At a birthday party for a friend, he stumbled inexplicably. Another night, he fell down the steps of a theater, startling a small crowd of people.
"Give him air!" someone yelled.
He was in his seventies by this point, so they whispered "old age" and helped him to his feet. But Morrie, who was always more in touch with his insides than the rest of us, knew something else was wrong. This was more than old age. He was weary all the time. He had trouble sleeping. He dreamt he was dying.
He began to see doctors. Lots of them. They tested his blood. They tested his urine. They put a scope up his rear end and looked inside his intestines. Finally, when nothing could be found, one doctor ordered a muscle biopsy, taking a small piece out of Morrie's calf. The lab report came back suggesting a neurological problem, and Morrie was brought in for yet another series of tests. In one of those tests, he sat in a special seat as they zapped him with electrical current--an electric chair, of sorts--and studied his neurological responses.
"We need to check this further," the doctors said, looking over his results.
"Why?" Morrie asked. "What is it?"
"We're not sure. Your times are slow."
His times were slow? What did that mean?
Finally, on a hot, humid day in August 1994, Morrie and his wife, Charlotte, went to the neurologist's office, and he asked them to sit before he broke the news: Morrie had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Lou Gehrig's disease, a brutal, unforgiving illness of the neurological system.
There was no known cure.
"How did I get it?" Morrie asked.
Nobody knew.
"Is it terminal?"
Yes.
"So I'm going to die?"
Yes, you are, the doctor said. I'm very sorry.
He sat with Morrie and Charlotte for nearly two hours, patiently answering their questions. When they left, the doctor gave them some information on ALS, little pamphlets, as if they were opening a bank account. Outside, the sun was shining and people were going about their business. A woman ran to put money in the parking meter. Another carried groceries. Charlotte had a million thoughts running through her mind: How much time do we have left? How will we manage? How will we pay the bills?
My old professor, meanwhile, was stunned by the normalcy of the day around him. Shouldn't the world stop? Don't they know what has happened to me?
But the world did not stop, it took no notice at all, and as Morrie pulled weakly on the car door, he felt as if he were dropping into a hole.
Now what? he thought.
As my old professor searched for answers, the disease took him over, day by day, week by week. He backed the car out of the garage one morning and could barely push the brakes. That was the end of his driving.
He kept tripping, so he purchased a cane. That was the end of his walking free.
He went for his regular swim at the YMCA, but found he could no longer undress himself. So he hired his first home care worker--a theology student named Tony--who helped him in and out of the pool, and in and out of his bathing suit. In the locker room, the other swimmers pretended not to stare. They stared anyhow. That was the end of his privacy.
In the fall of 1994, Morrie came to the hilly Brandeis campus to teach his final college course. He could have skipped this, of course. The university would have understood. Why suffer in front of so many people? Stay at home. Get your affairs in order. But the idea of quitting did not occur to Morrie.
Instead, he hobbled into the classroom, his home for more than thirty years. Because of the cane, he took a while to reach the chair. Finally, he sat down, dropped his glasses off his nose, and looked out at the young faces who stared back in silence.
"My friends, I assume you are all here for the Social Psychology class. I have been teaching this course for twenty years, and this is the first time I can say there is a risk in taking it, because I have a fatal illness. I may not live to finish the semester.
"If you feel this is a problem, I understand if you wish to drop the course."
He smiled.
And that was the end of his secret.
ALS is like a lit candle: it melts your nerves and leaves your body a pile of wax. Often. ...
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| View all 12 comments |
Levi Wallach (MSL quote), USA
<2007-02-14 00:00>
I read this book after hearing so many good things about it and the TV movie based on it. It's a very quick read - I finished it in two days, which is unheard of for me! The book is basically about Morrie Schwartz, a history professor at Brandeis University, who has been diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease) and is dying. A former student, Mitch Albom, who had become a fairly well known sports writer, heard about his teacher from an interview with Ted Koppel on Nightline and decided to pay a visit. This visit soon turned into regular meetings - on Tuesdays - since at the time there was a strike at Albom's newspaper. Albom plots Morrie's declining health, which is quite depressing, but at the same time imparts Morrie's wisdom. One definitely can get a sense of what the important things in life are from someone who has little left, but Morrie is particularly eloquent and seems to carry an upbeat dignity to the end. Sometimes it takes the wisdom of a dying man to jog us enough to realize that human relationships and health are more important than all the gadgets, modern conveniences, pressures to get ahead professionally and monetarily combined. This is just the main point that Morrie starts "teaching" Albom and getting through to someone who, like many of us from time to time, have gotten obsessed with the real trivialities of life. The only complaint I have about this book is that it wasn't longer. I wanted to take more time and savor the wisdom and sweetness of this old man, but, like his illness's swiftness, reading the book seemed to go by all too quickly.
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A reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-02-14 00:00>
This book is a best seller and continues to stay on the best seller list because in my opinion most people down deep understand the truth of Morrie's basic philosophy that people living exclusively in a materialistic world generally do so to replace what they feel is missing from their lives even though they may not be consciously aware, at the moment, of what precisely is "missing." What is missing ? I found part of this answer in a general sense in this book. I found even more precise and concrete answers in the book An Encounter With A Prophet. I highly recommend both of these books to anyone seeking to find out why they seem to continue to feel something is missing from life.
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Hoopes (MSL quote), USA
<2007-02-14 00:00>
This book has had more impact on my life than anything else I've ever read, by far. It's a reminder to appreciate the simple, little things in life. It's a reminder that when you're dead, the things you've accumulated and the things you've done will disappear. What will remain is the ways that you've affected or touched other people.
This is a simple book with simple messages.
Live fully and in the moment. Treat others with respect, kindness, love, and dignity. Seek joy.
However, these messages are easily lost given the constantly increasing pressures we all face. This book is a guide to a way that you can live your life where you'll be able to look back at the end and feel peace and contentment.
I've given copies of this book to many people that I know. I encourage you to read this book and do so with an open mind and heart.
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A reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-02-14 00:00>
Unfortunately, I read this book 2 years ago - less than a year after my Mom died of ALS. When I read it, all I saw was the dreaded disease and someone coping with death. It helped me alot, but I'd like to read it again to get the other message that it celebrates life! What a great story. If I could, I would buy 100 copies and give them out to anyone who was frowning, grouchy, or simply needed a lift! A great present for any occasion or no occasion at all!
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