Book Review: Tuesdays with Morrie

“Tuesdays with Morrie” is one of the international best-selling books which has been translated into more than 30 languages. The book is written by Mitch Albom. In this book, Mitch Albom quotes life’s greatest lessons which he learned from his dying professor (ALS* patient; ALS: Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis), Morrie Schwartz in the last days of his life. The Professor used to take Sociology class in the university days of Mitch Albom, he was his favorite student, and that’s why Morrie thought to share his life experiences with him when he came to know that he is going to die soon. Mitch considers this book as the final thesis that he made with his professor. Their gatherings would take place on Tuesdays, and this resulted in the name of the book.

Mitch quotes his professor: “We’re Tuesday people.”

None can share life’s greatest lessons better than the person who is about to meet the angel of death because when you realize you are going to die, you see everything much differently. The character of Morrie Schwartz is that person who was moving closer to the next horrible stages of ALS with each passing day. But, this journey, which was certainly going to end at death, made Morrie more articulate. His physical body was becoming weaker day by day, but his brain had yet a lot to say about life that had offered him this suffering. This was just because he had accepted his fate. Mitch writes, “He would not be ashamed of dying.” Morrie took this as an opportunity to be listened to and looked after by people especially his student, Mitch Albom. His final teachings changed the way Mitch would see his life. And after the publishing of this book, Morrie’s life lessons have impacted his readers’ point of view too. Morrie has expressed his opinions about fundamental values of life like being sorry for ourselves, regrets, death, emotions, family, fear of aging, money, love, marriage, culture, forgiveness, and the perfect day.

Talking about death, Morrie says that everyone knows that they are about to die but no one is going to believe it. If you start believing that you are certainly going to die, you will live life differently. His worth-sharing quotation about death is “once you learn how to die, you learn how to live.” The professor stresses the importance of family and love. He says, “Love is the only rational act, without love, we are birds with broken wings.” He relates family to the spiritual security of a person. Morrie’s view about emotions makes readers amazed for a while. He says that we should dive deep into the emotions, fully experience them and then we should de-attach ourselves from emotions and move on. Suffering fatal ALS disease, Morrie dies on Saturday morning. He said, “Death is as natural as life. It’s part of the deal we made.” According to Mitch, his funeral day was the graduation ceremony of their last classes in which they interpreted life.

In this book, the writer has comprehensively written about complex and philosophical ideas about life. The book was published in 1997 by Double Day publishers.

** Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (a-my-o-TROE-fik LAT-ur-ul skluh-ROE-sis), or ALS, is a progressive nervous system disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord, causing loss of muscle control. ALS is often called Lou Gehrig’s disease, after the baseball player who was diagnosed with it.