The Last lecture by Randy Pausch
Synopsis
"We cannot change the cards we are
dealt, just how we play the hand."
—Randy Pausch
A lot of professors give talks titled "The Last Lecture." Professors are asked to consider their demise and to ruminate on what matters most to them. And while they speak, audiences can't help but mull the same question: What wisdom would we impart to the world if we knew it was our last chance? If we had to vanish tomorrow, what would we want as our legacy?
When Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, was asked to give such a lecture, he didn't have to imagine it as his last, since he had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. But the lecture he gave—"Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams"—wasn't about dying. It was about the importance of overcoming obstacles, of enabling the dreams of others, of seizing every moment (because "time is all you have…and you may find one day that you have less than you think"). It was a summation of everything Randy had come to believe. It was about living.
In this book, Randy Pausch has combined the humor, inspiration and intelligence that made his lecture such a phenomenon and given it an indelible form. It is a book that will be shared for generations to come.
King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild
Synopsis
In the 1880's, as the European powers were carving up Africa, King Leopold II of
Belgium seized for himself the vast and largely unexplored territory surrounding
the Congo River. Carrying out a genocidal plundering of the Congo, he looted its
rubber, brutalized its people, and ultimately slashed the population by ten
million--all while shrewdly cultivating his international reputation as a great
humanitarian. Heroic efforts to expose this secret crime finally led to the
first great international human rights movement of the 20th century in which
everyone from Mark Twain to the Archbishop of Canterbury participated.
King Leopold's Ghost is the haunting portrait of a megalomaniac of monstrous proportions, a man as cunning as any of the great Shakespearean villains. It is also the deeply involving story of those who fought Leopold and of the explorers, missionaries, and rubber workers who witnessed the horror. With a cast of characters richer than any novelist could invent, this book will permanently inscribe these too long forgotten events on the conscience of the West.
Angels and Demons
by Dan Brown
The Historian
by Elizabeth Kostova
River of Doubt
by Candice Millard
The Johnstown Flood by David McCullough
Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler’s Shadow by Susan Bartoletti
Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose