#32 in Biography & memoir
The Last Lecture
- 237
- Pages
- about 4.5 h
- Reading time
Affiliate link: buying through it supports BookRank at no extra cost to you.
Our view
“The Last Lecture” is at once a memoir, a book of advice and a father’s legacy to his children. A computer science professor facing terminal cancer, Randy Pausch keeps his humour and dwells on what his life taught him. Some readers find it lands differently at different ages, and that on a return visit his devotion to work looks less admirable. A brief book for anyone open to plain counsel.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
The Last Lecture is a 2008 New York Times best-selling book co-authored by Randy Pausch—a professor of computer science, human-computer interaction, and design at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania—and Jeffrey Zaslow of the Wall Street Journal. The book extends the September 2007 lecture by Pausch entitled "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams". The Last Lecture is renowned for its witty humor, despite encompassing Pausch's farewell to his loved ones due to his terminal pancreatic cancer. In the book, through his past experiences, Pausch attempts to lend advice to his children that they may need once he has passed. He recounts memories growing up and important people who have been vital in "achieving his childhood dreams."
Where the score comes from
The sources average 8.4 across 357 ratings — not yet many, so the reader vote carries 71% of the weight and the rest pulls toward the Biography & memoir average of 8.1. That is how 8.3 comes out.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 8.2 | 18 | 5% |
| Google Books | 9.0 | 9 | 3% |
| Hardcover | 8.4 | 330 | 92% |
Frequently asked
How long is The Last Lecture?
It has 237 pages — shorter than 80% of the ranked books in Biography & memoir.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
The same shelf — Biography & memoir — and a score of 8.3, the closest to this book.
