Book Review: Tuesdays with Morrie

Tuesdays with Morrie: an old man, a young man, and life’s greatest lesson, by Mitch Albom, 1997

Tuesdays with Morrie is a series of meetings and conversations between a retired sociology professor from Brandeis and his former student, now a sports reporter for a Detroit newspaper. The professor, Morrie Schwartz, is dying of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), “Lou Gehrig disease.” ALS is a most difficult debilitating disease, slow, painful, demanding in the worst ways. Morrie and Mitch Albom meet on Tuesdays to talk over life. It is a poignant beautiful book addressing issues of life and death — love, marriage, broken families, forgiveness — but above all the story is about Morrie’s courage in coming to grips with what he says is his understanding of life fully and completely now that he knows that he is at death’s door. It is about life and not death, which Morrie claims is the least of his concerns. A wise and illuminating book, Tuesdays with Morrie is one of many personal pastoral books in the Renouf/Nelson Library. Come, seek, and find.

—The Rev. Paul Buckwalter