by Mitch Albom
p. 1997
About 7 or 8 years ago, when I was
working the Star Theaters box office, I once sold tickets to Mitch Albom.
I even checked his ID against his credit card to make sure it was really him,
not that I had any frame of reference for what he looked like or anything. Mitch
Albom was the only celebrity I ever encountered directly in that job, and I
didn’t even get to ask him anything because it would have been kind of awkward
to say “Hey! You’re that guy who wrote all those popular books I’ve never
read...” Well, I guess I could play it
differently now if I ever got to relive my brief moment of stargazing. This story
has no relevance to this review; I just felt like sharing my momentary
proximity with an honest to goodness Michigan ‘celeb.’
Mitch Albom made a name for himself
working as a sportswriter for the Detroit
Free Press in the nineties, but he didn’t blow up nationally until he wrote
Tuesdays with Morrie, a memoir of
sorts dedicated to his former college professor, Morrie Schwartz, who passed
away after a long battle with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease). Mitch had lost
contact with Morrie following college and only got in touch when he learned
about Morrie’s ailment through a Nightline interview featuring Morrie. Mitch
set out to keep some record of his beloved professor’s last days and final
words of wisdom and set up their Tuesday interactions in a familiar way: Mitch
as the student and Morrie as the teacher in the last ‘class’ he would ever
teach.
Each chapter covers a different
Tuesday and a different life topic—family, regrets, marriage, death, etc.
Despite being set up like a ‘class’ there was nothing inherently academic about
the lessons this ailing professor taught. The things Morrie has to say about
life aren’t particularly intellectual or revolutionary; he mostly just
expresses optimistic platitudes about life and love and waxes poetic exactly the
way you’d expect a retired English professor facing mortality to do. I’m not
saying Morrie didn’t mean what he said, or that there is anything wrong with
optimism, just that you are unlikely to read anything in Tuesdays with Morrie that you haven’t heard before.
I’m sure these interactions meant
the world to Mitch Albom, but I’m a
bit surprised that it was so impactful to millions of people nationwide. Unless
you have your own ‘Morrie’ I am skeptical that this book would be moving to
you; it induces some nostalgia for the college days, and kind of makes me wish
I had kept in better contact with a couple favored English professors of my
own, but Morrie didn’t seem like the kind of person I’d have connected with in
college (I prefer someone with a little more edge and a little less starry-eyed
idealism), so the things he had to say didn’t exactly resonate with me.
But then, Tuesdays with Morrie came out in the late 90s, when coffee table
mainstay, Chicken Soup for the Soul, was
ubiquitous, so I guess I am not too
surprised that people took to this book so strongly.
I read this book in a couple
sittings over two weeks ago and I’ve got to admit I’ve completely forgotten
most of the stuff that was said, which isn’t to say that it’s a terrible book.
It’s a perfectly inoffensive piece of fluff, and it induced a couple fond
chuckles from this reader, but it’s admittedly a little too pointless for me.
The writing wasn’t too bad, though, so I’d be willing to check out more of
Mitch Albom’s work. His second foray into writing, The Five People You Meet in Heaven, is fictional, and I’d be
interested to see how well Albom makes the transition between styles, but I’m
in no rush to indulge myself on his work.
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