I’d heard about something called The Last Lecture back when it first started generating buzz over a year ago, but I’m always slow to try out the latest “Internet sensations” because these things tend to disappoint more often than not. But after all this time, the story of Randy Pausch, the former Carnegie Mellon University professor who bravely battled pancreatic cancer still resonates for millions of people. I finally read the book and watched the actual lecture over the weekend — and both were pretty amazing.

Pausch’s last lecture was a talk given at CMU as part of a regular series that the university put on for students. Basically, professors in different disciplines are asked to put together a “final talk”, something that they’d want to leave students with if they never spoke in their area of expertise again.

Paush, a computer science prof, went in a more literal direction, as he had just been diagnosed with terminal cancer and had only a few months left to live. He decided to talk not strictly about computer science, but about how to live a good life. To him, that meant achieving your childhood dreams and helping others to achieve theirs.

The lecture, which lasted for one hour and sixteen minutes, covers a variety of topics, starting with Pausch’s childhood, and moving on to the personal milestones he has achieved, the highlights of his teaching career, and carving out what he hopes to be his legacy.

In the book, Pausch explains that he deliberately decided not to talk about the most important things in his life, his wife and children, because he didn’t think he would be able to hold it together for that long. But nevertheless, we see at the end that it was really all for them anyway.

The book, which followed the lecture, is obviously similar to the original talk and uses many of the same quotes and photographs (Pausch used slides in his lecture). But the book of course contains a lot more stuff that Pausch couldn’t fit into the lecture, and gives even more detailed information on some of the things he touched upon in the original talk. I found that watching the lecture first and then reading the book was a good way to take in the whole experience.

While there’s not exactly a lot of ground-breaking advice in Pausch’s Last Lecture, the professor’s charisma and upbeat delivery make the time fly by, and of course the message is worthwhile for everyone.

Check out the video on YouTube by following the link below. Pausch’s Last Lecture has been viewed more than 8.2 million times to date — a staggering number for sure!

Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture

Hawaii is one of those books that I’ve been meaning to read for a long time, but have put off because of the sheer size of the thing. Like almost all of Michener’s works, Hawaii is an epic in every sense of the word, and comes in at well over 1,000 pages. I had some doubts about being able to sustain interest in the book throughout its entirety, so I wasn’t in any real hurry to tackle it. But I finally got around to it last month, and though it did indeed take a looong time to get from cover to cover, I’m proud to say I actually did it!

Plot summary (with possible spoilers): It’s pretty much impossible to give a comprehensive summary of a book of this length in a single blog post, so I’m going to have to just cover the basics here. Michener mixes fact and fiction to give a sweeping account of the history of Hawaii, from the beginning of the islands to the mid-1950s.

The novel starts by describing the geological machinations that helped form the islands, and then moves on to discuss the earliest inhabitants who arrived from Bora Bora and Tahiti. Those two topics are given the shortest coverage out of the entire novel, but are fairly interesting nonetheless.

From there, Michener brings the action up to the 1800s, when missionaries from New England settled on the island to help convert the “savages”. This is when character development really begins to take off, and when the complex, interwoven stories of all the major players start to take shape.

Finally, the novel goes on to present the tale of Chinese and Japanese workers who were imported to the island to help work on the sugar and pineapple plantations. Through it all, Michener focuses on a handful of families to give the novel a personal feel — and to show how each generation deeply influenced each succeeding generation.

My Reaction: I have to admit that it was a bit slow going in the beginning. While the geological formations and the primitive beliefs of the Bora Borans was interesting to a point, I think Michener went into far too much detail (and for far too long) for my tastes. I’m not surprised to hear that many people give up on this novel before even getting to the missionaries… there is quite a lot to wade through in the beginning, and it does feel like filler after a while.

But once the missionaries came into the picture, I was hooked. The success of a book of this length absolutely depends on the author’s ability to create compelling characters that the reader will want to stick with through thick and thin. Michener did remarkably well in this respect. In fact, I didn’t even realize how much I liked some of the characters until they were out of the picture. For instance, when Michener mentioned in passing that Dr. John Whipple finally died, I felt sad — even though I didn’t pay much attention to the character while he was in the midst of everything.

Another reason that I think Hawaii succeeds as a whole is the way that Michener makes each successive group of characters even more interesting than the last. Although Chinese immigrant Char Nyuk Tsin’s story started out exceedingly slowly, by the time her character was fully developed, I had invested myself deeply in her. She was truly fantastic!

Yes, there were several boring patches along the way and it does take some determination to stick with Hawaii until the end. But this is a novel that definitely deserves all the critical praise and commercial success it experienced when it was initially published. You won’t be sorry for the effort you put into reading this one!