Book #4: The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch

This has actually taken me a while to blog about because, honestly, I haven't had a book affect me this way in a long time. I should have known, as an adult who lost a parent at age 7, that reading this book about a parent facing terminal cancer would be emotional for me. I think that after all the press this book had gotten, I had made myself believe that this would be more of an advice book written by someone with a unique perspective on the fragility of life. The book has great advice written with humor and humility, but when it is all said and done, this is a goodbye story from a father to his young children, and I wasn't quite prepared for that. I kept reading it as though my mother was speaking to me and my siblings, so needless to say, I was actually crying (not tearing up, but crying) when I was reading the last chapters. Randy Pausch was a well spoken, highly intelligent man who found a way to speak in a special way to all of us in the special club of children who lost parents too soon. I volunteer to help children like this now, and I hope that others who read it may hear the voices of their own parents, saying the things that were never spoken. This has made it to my "Always Keep" bookshelf. Great, great book.