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The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.Įveryone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). It's part of the deal we made.'' If that is so (and it's not a notion quickly gainsaid), this book could well have been called ``The Art of the Deal.'' Place it under the heading ``Inspirational.'' ``Death,'' said Morrie, ``is as natural as life. (The substantial costs of Morrie's last illness, Albom tells us, were partly defrayed by the publisher's advance). This book, small and easily digested, stopping just short of the maudlin and the mawkish, is on the whole sincere, sentimental, and skillful. Albom learned well the teaching that ``death ends a life, not a relationship.'' The love between the old man and the younger one is manifest. ``Love each other or perish,'' he warned, quoting Auden. ``Love is the only rational act,'' Morrie said. Rather, he expands a little on the professor's aphorisms, which are, to be sure, unassailable. Albom does not present a full transcript of the regular Tuesday talks. Unfortunately, but surely not surprisingly, those relying on this text will not actually learn The Meaning of Life here. He calls his weekly visits to his teacher his last class, and the present book a term paper. Albom well fulfilled the age-old obligation to visit the sick. That was how the author first learned of Morrie's condition. The dying man, largely because of his life-affirming attitude toward his death-dealing illness, became a sort of thanatopic guru, and was the subject of three Ted Koppel interviews on Nightline. This is the vivid record of the teacher's battle with muscle- wasting amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's disease. Here Albom recounts how, recently, as the old man was dying, he renewed his warm relationship with his revered mentor.

Award-winning sportswriter Albom was a student at Brandeis University, some two decades ago, of sociologist Morrie Schwartz.