The Last Lecture

As I've mentioned before, I read a lot. I mostly read books about sports, but every once and a while I will hear about a book that interests me. Since I really hate mowing our yard, I try to use this time to "read" book tapes that I normally wouldn't get to in the near future (because of an extreme backlog of books on my nightstand). For example, last summer I listened to Game of Shadows, the book about Barry Bonds and steroids.

I had recently been noticing a book consistently at the top of the New York Times weekly best seller list and had also read an article about it. The Last Lecture was written by Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Randy was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer a couple of years ago and was given 3 - 6 months to live. Carnegie Mellon had a "last lecture" series (the name was of the series was changed to "Journeys" just before Randy's lecture) for its professors and Randy gave one entitled "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams". It was about lessons he had learned throughout life. The lecture became a Youtube sensation - around 6 million people have viewed it (even though it is over an hour). I downloaded the actual lecture to my Zune player and plan on viewing it on my Korea trip next month. The book is very emotional, especially when he talks about his 3 young children (2 boys ages 6 and 4 and a 2 year old girl). He made individually-tailored videos for each so they could remember him, especially his daughter because she will have few/no memories of him. For her, one of the things he wanted her to remember was he was the 1st man to ever fall in love with her. I don't want to give away many details because I highly recommend that you read (or listen to) it; it is one of my all-time favorites.

Randy lost his battle with cancer a couple of weeks ago (July 25th); he was 47 years old. ABC's Primetime did a great follow-up story on him a few days later (I'm sure you can find it on Youtube).