The Last Lecture, by Randy Pausch

I like to read books about life and death experiences, and this one seemed interesting. It is interesting, and somewhat uplifting - a celebration of life by a man who is doomed to die in a short time, of pancreatic cancer, and that leaves this collection of life lessons to his kids. I couldn't but empathize with the author's words - he lived fully a good life, he seemed like a really nice man and most of his advice is sound and sensible.

Yet, I couldn't help but think: "how American he is!". All the positive thinking, the sharing of his dire situation, the help groups he and his wife belonged to, it's really such a different reality from ours. It always impressed me how in the American culture people like to have everything so neatly organised and labelled - if you have cancer, you go to cancer supporting groups, if you find your son is gay, you join a gay men's mother's group, and so on. Also the use of therapy and counselling for all kinds of problems, in the optimistic belief that for every problem there are professionals who know better and that can help you deal with it. Of course there's nothing wrong about that, and if it's helpful, I guess people should go for that. But it's so different from my own individualistic approach to life and its problems, I never believed there to be neat labels and formulas to deal with problems and suffering.

Anyway, the book is a nice read and uplifting. And I heard about the alice.org project, that seems very interesting, I think I would like to explore it, maybe it will be a way for me to learn something about computer language!