Review of Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom
(In 3 weeks I read seven books in preparation to write the Analysis of the Competition section for the book proposal for my co-authored nonfiction book Never Stop Dancing. The seven books are A Grief Observed, Two Kisses for Maddy, The Year of Magical Thinking, About Alice, A Widow's Story, Tuesdays with Morrie, and When Bad Things Happen to Good People. I'll write a review for each book. Death and grief are common, but we experience each uniquely.)
Mitch Albom confesses in his 2007 Afterword that Tuesdays with Morrie almost didn’t find a publisher. What a shame that would have been!
The story is well known by now: Two men--one young, one old; the student, the teacher--sit down every Tuesday for several weeks to have a conversation. The old man is dying, slowly, from ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease). It's a "final class," as Albom writes. And what are the lessons? On life, death, and everything in between, from both the young man's and the old man's perspectives.
I enjoyed this book on multiple levels: for the idea, its execution, and its message. Albom records his conversations with Morrie and uses the best snippets from their fourteen Tuesdays together to create the journey both men take, one towards death, the other towards insight. Interspersed are Albom's recollections and musings on life, death, and what it truly means to live. By book's end, Albom has "graduated from class."
I used a similar technique in my nonfiction book Never Stop Dancing (working title), for which I conducted a year-long series of interviews with my good friend John Robinette after his wife, Amy Polk, was killed in a pedestrian traffic accident in Washington, DC. Talking with John--just as we'd done over a number of years, as friends--seemed to me to be the best thing I could for him in that circumstance. Just sit and talk with him, and listen to what he was going through, as he was going through it. Our narrative weaves John’s story of anguish and recovery with my reflections about his loss, my evolving understanding of my own past losses, and the project itself. Often, it seems, the greatest gift we can give each other is the gift of ourselves, by simply being there for the other person in pain, to walk with them in their difficult time.
To learn more about our book project, visit http://www.robert-jacoby.com, and to follow John's journey, visit him at http://www.hole-in-the-sun.com.
I really liked it
4/5 Goodreads
4/5 Amazon
Mitch Albom confesses in his 2007 Afterword that Tuesdays with Morrie almost didn’t find a publisher. What a shame that would have been!
The story is well known by now: Two men--one young, one old; the student, the teacher--sit down every Tuesday for several weeks to have a conversation. The old man is dying, slowly, from ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease). It's a "final class," as Albom writes. And what are the lessons? On life, death, and everything in between, from both the young man's and the old man's perspectives.
I enjoyed this book on multiple levels: for the idea, its execution, and its message. Albom records his conversations with Morrie and uses the best snippets from their fourteen Tuesdays together to create the journey both men take, one towards death, the other towards insight. Interspersed are Albom's recollections and musings on life, death, and what it truly means to live. By book's end, Albom has "graduated from class."
I used a similar technique in my nonfiction book Never Stop Dancing (working title), for which I conducted a year-long series of interviews with my good friend John Robinette after his wife, Amy Polk, was killed in a pedestrian traffic accident in Washington, DC. Talking with John--just as we'd done over a number of years, as friends--seemed to me to be the best thing I could for him in that circumstance. Just sit and talk with him, and listen to what he was going through, as he was going through it. Our narrative weaves John’s story of anguish and recovery with my reflections about his loss, my evolving understanding of my own past losses, and the project itself. Often, it seems, the greatest gift we can give each other is the gift of ourselves, by simply being there for the other person in pain, to walk with them in their difficult time.
To learn more about our book project, visit http://www.robert-jacoby.com, and to follow John's journey, visit him at http://www.hole-in-the-sun.com.
I really liked it
4/5 Goodreads
4/5 Amazon
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