Tuesdays with Morrie
Mitch Albom, 1997
A sportswriter reconnects with his dying sociology professor and records their Tuesday conversations about love, work, and fear.
Mitch Albom
Mitch Albom's books are quiet, plainspoken and often very short: he tends to take one ordinary person, put them beside someone at the end of life, and let the conversation do the work. Tuesdays with Morrie is the place to start, since it is the actual record of those Tuesday talks with his old professor, and The Five People You Meet in Heaven carries the same warmth into fiction, following a maintenance man at an amusement park after he dies. Both share a steady interest in small lives and the people who pass through them, and they suit you when you want something gentle and direct to read in a sitting or two.
Feels like tenderness, melancholy and death.
Start with Tuesdays with Morrie.
Morrie Schwartz was a real Brandeis sociologist who appeared on Ted Koppel's Nightline in 1995; those interviews made him famous before the book.
The dignity of being the oldest person in the room and not caring.
He used to go to this church in Harvard Square every Wednesday night for something called “Dance Free.” They had flashing lights and booming speakers and Morrie would wander in among the mostly student crowd, wearing a white T-shirt and black sweatpants and a towel around his neck, and whatever music was playing, that’s the music to which he danced. He’d do the lindy to Jimi Hendrix. He twisted and twirled, he waved his arms like a conductor on amphetamines, until sweat was dripping down the middle of his back. No one there knew he was a prominent doctor of sociology, with years of experience as a college professor and several well-respected books. They just thought he was some old nut. Books by Mitch Albom
The Five People You Meet in Heaven
Mitch Albom, 2003
Eddie dies at the amusement park where he worked, then meets five strangers who show how his ordinary life touched other people's. A short book about unremarkable lives.
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