Instead of throwing a bucket of ice over herself to raise awareness of ALS, my best friend nominated me to read the book Tuesdays with Morrie. Now, this is not exactly an obscure book, and so it is a shock to me that in the many weeks of news feeds being full of people’s ice bucket videos (and status’ of people complaining about it) not one person had mentioned this book. I’m a huge fan of Albom’s novel, The 5 People you Meet in Heaven, to the extent that I was terrified nothing would ever live up to it. Tuesdays comes very close! The story follows one of the most incredible men to ever have been immortalised on paper, Morrie a college professor with a pure soul and a way with words, in his last months of life as ALS slowly but viciously ruins his body and kills him. Morrie passes on such incredible knowledge, and has such an unprecedented outlook on life that it is important to remind oneself often whilst reading, that he was a real man and a lot of his conversations with Mitch, are verbatim. Despite the subject matter, this book is far from depressing, in fact, I would say it is one of the most uplifting books I have ever read. The focus is not on the disease, although the descriptions of this will break your heart, but on a man’s acceptance of death, and as Morrie explains, only by accepting death, can you truly live.
This is an unusually short review, because there is nothing I could say about this book that will do it justice, and nothing I could say about life that Morrie couldn’t say a thousand times better.
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