Imran

Mitch Albom, a former student of Morrie Schwartz, decided to meet every Tuesday with his beloved, now dying, former professor to record his life stories and reflections. Intuitively and perhaps unintentionally, Mitch gave Morrie a magnificent final gift – the gift of being valued and respected, and allowing Morrie to continue to be a teacher, even in the shadow of death.

Tolstoy’s insights on the experience and psychological challenges of facing death are so astute that it seems almost impossible that they would be available to anyone who has occupied only the land of the living.  The novella details the life and early death of an upwardly mobile bureaucrat, who realizes the shallowness of his existence only when death is near.

Original French version of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

Mr. Bauby, the former editor of Elle magazine, suffered a massive stroke at age 43, leaving him with locked-in syndrome. He literally ‘blinked-out’ this amazing memoir with his left eye, one of the few functions over which he maintained motor control. His incredible story is an extraordinary reminder of the resiliency of the human spirit. Readers will never again look at a non-communicative patient in quite the same way.

Anatole Broyard, a writer and former book critic for the New York Times, wrote this book between the time he was diagnosed with prostate cancer and his death 14 months later. What is compelling about this book is his insistence that medicine acknowledge whole persons. “When a doctor refuses to acknowledge a patient, he is, in effect abandoning him to his illness,” he wrote. The book is also full of wonderful humour and style. In his inimitable way, the author was saying that there were aspects of self that cancer would never touch.