Friday, October 29, 2010

The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch

Our book for November is The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch.  This is an incredible story of living your dreams and experiencing life to its fullest.  We will be meeting on Tuesday, November 30th at 7:30pm at Lauren's house.

Here's a summary of the book from Amazon:

"A lot of professors give talks titled "The Last Lecture." Professors are asked to consider their demise and to ruminate on what matters most to them. And while they speak, audiences can't help but mull the same question: What wisdom would we impart to the world if we knew it was our last chance? If we had to vanish tomorrow, what would we want as our legacy?

"When Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, was asked to give such a lecture, he didn't have to imagine it as his last, since he had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. But the lecture he gave--"Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams"--wasn't about dying. It was about the importance of overcoming obstacles, of enabling the dreams of others, of seizing every moment (because "time is all you have...and you may find one day that you have less than you think"). It was a summation of everything Randy had come to believe. It was about living.

"In this book, Randy Pausch has combined the humor, inspiration and intelligence that made his lecture such a phenomenon and given it an indelible form. It is a book that will be shared for generations to come."


There are several copies of this fabulous book at the library, including book-on-CD versions.  Used copies are also available online very cheaply.  But if you are still unable to read this book (or even if you do read it), here is the video of the actual "last lecture" as given at Carnegie Mellon.  It is a wonderful video, which only helps to further show Randy's personality and great attitude.

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