I had much still to learn about the complex moral choices that my parents and others in their generation had been called on to make-choices that were still shaping my life and also that of the world.” I had been brought up to believe in a history of my Czechoslovak homeland that was less tangled and more straightforward than the reality. “I had no idea that my family heritage was Jewish or that more than twenty of my relatives had died in the Holocaust. Albright does that very nicely here, introducing the greatest surprise of her life. I knew.Ī common gambit in the world of great opening lines is to begin by confidently walking down a path of certitude, and then abruptly changing course with a frank admission that you were wrong. Others might be insecure about their identities I was not and never had been. I was sure enough that I did not feel a need to ask questions. I thought by then that I knew all there was to know about my past, who “my people” were, and the history of my native land.

I was fifty-nine when I began serving as U.S. The film received four Emmy nominations, winning three (Best Motion Picture Made for Television, Best Actor in a Motion Picture for Lemmon, and Best Supporting Actor for Azaria). But after Tuesdays with Morrie was published in 1997, it spent four years on The New York Times Best Seller list, selling nearly twenty million copies (it was adapted into a popular 1999 made-for-tv film, with Jack Lemmon as Schwartz and Hank Azaria as Albom. After reaching out to his former professor, Albom flew every week from Detroit to Boston to visit the 78-year-old Schwartz at his home (a newspaper strike in Detroit dictated the timing of the visits: every Tuesday for fourteen weeks).Īlbom hoped the proceeds from an anticipated book might help to pay Schwartz’s medical bills, but he didn’t expect much. The two men had been close in the 1970s, and Albom felt guilty about letting sixteen years pass with no contact. In 1995, Albom was an acclaimed sports reporter at the Detroit Free Press when he learned that one of his favorite Brandeis University professors, Morrie Schwartz, was dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease. This is a wonderful opening paragraph to what many people regard as the best non-fiction book of 1997-and one of the most touching and inspirational books of all time. The last class of my old professor’s life took place once a week in his house, by a window in the study where he could watch a small hibiscus plant shed its pink leaves. Adams’ writing skills are on dazzling display on almost every page, and you will never again look at some of the animals in the same way (about the kakapo, for example, Adams wrote: “You want to hug it and tell it everything will be all right, although you know that it probably won’t be”). If you’re a fan of travel books and have not yet seen this one, make every effort to rectify the unfortunate situation as soon as you can. Last Chance to See is a book of travel essays written by Adams as he and zoologist Mark Carwardine traveled the world in search of such exotic, endangered species as kakapos in New Zealand, komodo dragons in Indonesia, and white rhinos in Zaire. The land is folded and twisted and broken on such a scale that it makes your brain quiver and sing in your skull just trying to comprehend what it is looking at.” Just when you think an essay’s opening words couldn’t get much better, Adams continues in the second paragraph: “Fiordland, a vast tract of mountainous terrain that occupies the southwest corner of South Island, New Zealand, is one of the most astounding pieces of land anywhere on God’s earth, and one’s first impulse, standing on a clifftop surveying it all, is simply to burst into spontaneous applause.”Īnd, remarkably, it gets even better as we move into the essay’s third paragraph: “It is magnificent. This is writing at the level of virtuosity, and an extremely satisfying experience for any reader, and especially connoisseurs of travel writing. This is the spectacular opening paragraph of one of the best travel essays I’ve ever read-Adam’s account of his visit to the Fiordland region of New Zealand in the late 1980s.

If you took the whole of Norway, scrunched it up a bit, shook out all the moose and reindeer, hurled it ten thousand miles around the world, and filled it with birds, then you’d be wasting your time, because it looks very much as if someone has already done it.

Lily and the art of being sisyphus