Awards-

• Listen Up Award
  Publishers Weekly

Excerpts-

• From the book

  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...

About the Author-

• Mitch Albom is the author of six previous books. A nationally syndicated columnist for the Detroit Free Press and a nationally syndicated radio host for ABC and WJR-AM, Albom has, for more than a decade, been named top sports columnist in the nation by the Sports Editors of America, the highest honor in the field. A panelist on ESPN’s Sports Reporters, Albom also regularly serves as a commentator for that network. He serves on numerous charitable boards and has founded two charities in metropolitan Detroit: The Dream Fund, which helps underprivileged youth study the arts, and A Time to Help, a monthly volunteer program. He lives with his wife, Janine, in Michigan.

Reviews-

• [Editor's note: This program, originally recorded in 1997, has been updated with a new introduction.]--TUESDAYS WITH MORRIE inspired readers with Morrie Schwartz's insightful and compelling outlook on life. The book has been re-released on audio with a new introduction by author Mitch Albom, a sportswriter and radio host whose reading captures the essence of Schwartz. Although the new introduction adds little, the bestseller remains a thought-provoking chronicle of Schwartz's struggle with Lou Gehrig's disease. Albom's reading superbly balances his emotional attachment to Schwartz with the need to avoid sounding overly sentimental. While Albom's delivery could not be better, perhaps the most important reason to listen is the actual recordings of Schwartz replayed at the end of the book. They demonstrate that, although a book can capture words, only the tape recorder can fully capture the person behind the words. D.J.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine
• 

  August 18, 1997
  As a student at Brandeis University in the late 1970s, Albom was especially drawn to his sociology professor, Morris Schwartz. On graduation he vowed to keep in touch with him, which he failed to do until 1994, when he saw a segment about Schwartz on the TV program Nightline, and learned that he had just been diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease. By then a sports columnist for the Detroit Free Press and author of six books, including Fab Five, Albom was idled by the newspaper strike in the Motor City and so had the opportunity to visit Schwartz in Boston every week until the older man died. Their dialogue is the subject of this moving book in which Schwartz discourses on life, self-pity, regrets, aging, love and death, offering aphorisms about each--e.g., "After you have wept and grieved for your physical losses, cherish the functions and the life you have left." Far from being awash in sentiment, the dying man retains a firm grasp on reality. An emotionally rich book and a deeply affecting memorial to a wise mentor, who was 79 when hedied in 1995.

• If you've seen the pair of moving "Nightline" interviews with Professor Morrie Schwartz, you may have some idea of what to expect here. Detroit Free Press sportswriter Mitch Albom, Schwartz's one-time student, herein chronicles his last days with his dying mentor, a sociologist who courageously, dispassionately studied his own degeneration from Lou Gehrig's disease. A radio host and a journalist, Albom narrates as well as he writes, eschewing excessive sentiment. He wants to share what he learned from his Tuesdays with Morrie. For, as Schwartz told him, "I'm on the last great journey. People want me to tell them what to pack." Listeners who feel something important is to be gained can follow up this tape by reading Schwartz's own book, Letting Go. Y.R. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine
• Robert Bly, author of Iron John

  "This is a sweet book of a man's love for his mentor. It has a stubborn honesty that nourishes the living."

• Jon Kabat-Zinn, coauthor of Everyday Blessings and Wherever You Go, There You Are "A deeply moving account of courage and wisdom, shared by an inveterate mentor looking into the multitextured face of his own death. There is much to be learned by sitting in on this final class."
• Joanna Bull, Founder and Executive Director of Gilda's Club "All of the saints and Buddhas have taught us that wisdom and compassion are one. Now along comes Morrie, who makes it perfectly plain. His living and dying show us the way."

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