Easy criers beware! This book is not a lighthearted, feel-good read.

‘The Last Lecture’ was written by Randy Pausch, who was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer and follows his coping with the disease and accepting that he wants to pass on as much as he can before he passes on himself. The title refers to his final lecture at Carnegie Mellon, where he was a professor of Computer Science. The lecture was titled ‘Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams.’

Pausch is able to relay the crushing mortality he must have been feeling as he wrote the book, but also remain hopeful and keep a positive outlook. He is well aware that he is going to die and yet he remained happy and had fun in his life. It is one the man points he stresses throughout the book, to continue to have fun. Inside he tells stories of his own childhood and you can tell that he’s partially writing the book as a way to set himself up on a shelf so that his children, when they’re older, might come back and pick up a copy and see the lessons he hadn’t been able to fully instill in them. Instead, they could read it through this medium.

 No matter age or gender, anyone can enjoy this book and be able to take something with them from it and apply it to their life. While Pausch passed away only a few months after the books initial publication, he got some time in the spotlight and got to see the positive effects of his work after the initial lecture.