About the Author

Mitch Albom is an internationally renowned author, journalist, screenwriter, playwright, radio and TV broadcaster and philanthropist. His 13 books have collectively sold more than 35 million copies worldwide and have been published in 49 territories, in 45 languages, and have been made into Emmy Award-winning and critically acclaimed TV movies. A longtime panelist on ESPN's THE SPORTS REPORTERS, Albom has also penned films, plays, and a musical. For more than a decade, he was named top sports columnist in the nation by the Sports Editors of America, the highest honor in his field. In 2006, he founded S.A.Y. Detroit, an umbrella organisation that now operates nine charities dedicated to improving lives of the neediest Detroiters. He also runs an orphanage in Port-au-Prince, Haiti - the Have Faith Haiti Mission. He lives with his wife, Janine, in Michigan.

Reviews

A Detroit Free Press journalist and best-selling author recounts his weekly visits with a dying teacher who years before had set him straight.

As a student at Brandeis University in the late 1970s, Albom was especially drawn to his sociology professor, Morris Schwartz. On graduation he vowed to keep in touch with him, which he failed to do until 1994, when he saw a segment about Schwartz on the TV program Nightline, and learned that he had just been diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease. By then a sports columnist for the Detroit Free Press and author of six books, including Fab Five, Albom was idled by the newspaper strike in the Motor City and so had the opportunity to visit Schwartz in Boston every week until the older man died. Their dialogue is the subject of this moving book in which Schwartz discourses on life, self-pity, regrets, aging, love and death, offering aphorisms about each‘e.g., "After you have wept and grieved for your physical losses, cherish the functions and the life you have left." Far from being awash in sentiment, the dying man retains a firm grasp on reality. An emotionally rich book and a deeply affecting memorial to a wise mentor, who was 79 when hedied in 1995. (Sept.)