I try to avoid writing critiques or reviews of books and movies. I’m not very current or very highbrow. My last trip to the movies was to see “Little Fockers” on Christmas Day with second row seats, far right. Before that, I honestly cannot remember the last time I went to the movie theater. I can say I usually have a book going. Two books ago I read the Catcher in the Rye which for the polarity of reactions I get from people would need a separate blog. In addition, everyone else read it in high school. Today, I finished the book, The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch. You might remember the story…it was a professor at Carnegie Mellon diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and given just a few months to live, who gave his famous last lecture in front of four hundred people. (If you want to know more on the background, you can visit www.thelastlecture.com) I had always been fascinated by this human-interest story and all the buzz it got so I was excited to read the book. In addition, I’m a total sap and I feel that stories like this always have so much valuable insight and it did, it was just too difficult to find these insights amongst all the pages that played to his unbridled ego.
Multiple times in the book, Pausch admits to being arrogant in his younger days, overly frank (I would say curt), and analytic to a fault. Now let me say that this tenured professor accomplished many great things in the entertainment industry and in academia and has every right to be proud of those accomplishments. In the lecture and book, he is very concerned with what his children will take away from his messages and how they will remember him. Pausch spends so much of the book detailing the students he helped and his personal accomplishments that I think without knowing him (and sadly, they will not know him very well) his children might not gain from him any lessons in humility. In the way that he describes his wife, it seems that she, like most caregivers in her situation, was both selfless and humble, so perhaps he felt the need to take his message in a different direction. Regardless, what I expected to be a thought provoking collection of anecdotes and insights felt more like a glorified resume with a bit of sentiment mixed in. The book lacked a general sense of humility I would expect to accompany such a critical reflection of one’s life, but I haven’t been there so I really can’t say what dispositions I would or would not feel in Pausch’s situation; I just know I would value humility over most messages that my children could potentially take away.
The front jacket of the book offers some foreshadowing as it reads, “We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.” – Randy Pausch. Ok, I’m positive that someone else said that before the book was published in 2008. No way that Randy Pausch was the originator of that quote. In the first chapter, he asks himself when trying to frame up his lecture, “What do I, alone, truly have to offer?” In chapter 38, entitled “If at First you Don’t Succeed…, ” he lists some of his favorite clichés. Fail. In chapter 30, he tells a story about how his mother called him Randolph throughout his life despite his preference to be called Randy. He asked her, “Do you really believe your right to name me supersedes my right to have my own identity?” When she mailed him letters while he was away at college, she addressed the letters to Randolph Pausch. Upon receiving the letters, he would scribble “no such person at this address” and returned them to sender. I find this act pretty audacious. I didn’t even go “away” to college but I was so excited every time I got mail from home that if my parents addressed a care package to “Kristin Miller Gouda-Breath Stack”, I would have torn into that package of love all the same.
What bothered me the most and what really made it feel like the world’s longest resume were the countless detailed anecdotes of the girlfriends, students, and colleagues the author helped along the way and just how wildly successful that they had become on account of his help. Like the ex-girlfriend he kindly got out of debt by suggesting she got a job on Tuesdays instead of taking yoga on Tuesday nights to relieve the stress from her debt. How he risked his potential tenure to keep a student, Dennis, from being expelled because Pausch believed in what the student, who happened to be brilliant in computer sciences, could achieve. The chapter ends with one of those horrible “full circle statements” that I try (at times, unsuccessfully) to avoid in my blogs, “I enabled Dennis’s dream way back when he needed it… and now that I need it, he’s enabling mine.” As a reader, you get the feeling Pausch would have been good with just letting his audience know he enabled Dennis’ dream and ending the sentence right there. There are plenty more examples like this.
The saddest part about the book is that the overarching messages were valuable but Pausch’s bravado and at times, arrogance detracts from some of his important points like “Take time out. It’s not a real vacation if you’re reading email or calling in for messages.” Great point. Then we learned how Pausch handled this when his boss insisted that he be reachable during his MONTH long honeymoon. Pausch recorded the following on his voicemail, “Hi, this is Randy. I waited until I was thirty-nine to get married, so my wife and I are going away for a month. I hope you don’t have a problem with this, but my boss does. Apparently, I have to be reachable.” Then he gave them his in-law’s names and their hometown and gave the caller further directions, “If you call directory assistance, you can get their number. And then, if you can convince my new in-laws that your emergency merits interrupting their only daughter’s honeymoon, they have our number” (pg. 111).
See what I am getting at?
There are hundreds of books that will offer you inspiration or insight if that’s what you’re looking for at this point in your life. Pausch muddies the insights in The Last Lecture by incorporating his brash interactions with others and his countless stories of accomplishment (none of which involve becoming a good husband or father) that any sentiment you might have felt is completely erased. He makes good points and backs them up with ridiculous examples like his chapter on delegation. In one picture, he shows himself holding his 18 month old daughter’s bottle upright for her while she is eating. In the second picture, she’s holding the bottle (pg. 110).) Wow. Showing an infant holding his or her own bottle does not drive home the topic of delegation to me.
It is definitely a good book for the more overachieving, highly career-driven person and not recommendable to the more sociocentric/sappy personalities out there. Find your sap and quotables elsewhere.
airtime. In no particular order, here are theories/trends I think should be further investigated:
