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.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS:  Randy Pausch (Oct. 23, 1960 – July 25, 2008) was an American professor of Computer Science, Human Computer Interaction, and Design at Carnegie Mellon University (CMR) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. From 1988-1997, he taught at the University of Virginia. He was an award-winning teacher and researcher, and worked with Adobe, Google, Electronic Arts (EA), and Walt Disney Imagineering, and pioneered the Alice project. Pausch learned that he had pancreatic cancer in Sept. 2006, and in Aug. 2007 he was given a terminal diagnosis: “3 to 6 months of good health left.” He gave an upbeat lecture titled “The Last Lecture: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams” on Sept. 28, 2007, at Carnegie Mellon, which became a popular You Tube vido and led to other media appearances. He then co-authored a book called The Last Lecture on the same theme, which became a New York Times best seller.Although Pausch lost his cancer battle on July 25, 2008, his legacy lives on through The Last Lecture.  Jeffrey Zaslow, a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, attended the last lecture, and wrote the story that helped fuel worldwide interest in it. He lives in suburban Detroit with his wife, Sherry, and daughters Jordan, Alex and Eden.