This Week's Bestsellers

The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch

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 Acheiving 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 tless 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.

To learn more, and for links to watch the Last Lecture online, visit www.TheLastLecture.com


The Eleventh Man by Ivan Doig

Driven by the memory of a fallen teammate, Treasure State University's 1941 starting lineup went down as a legend in Montana football history, charging through the season undefeated. Two years later, the "Supreme Team" is caught up in World War II. Ten of them are scattered around the globe in the war's lonely and dangerous theaters. The eleventh man, Ben Reinking, has been plucked from pilot training by a military propaganda machine hungry for heroes. He is to chronicle the adventures of his teammates, man by man, for publication in small-town newspapers across the country like the one his father edits. Ready for action, he chafes at the assignment, not knowing that it will bring him love from an unexpected quarter and test the law of averages, which holds that all but one of his teammates should come through the conflict unscathed.

A deeply American story, the Eleventh Man is Ivan Doig's most powerful novel to date.

Ivan Doig was born in Montana and grew up along the Rocky Mountain Fron, the dramatic landscape that has inspired much of his writing. A finalist for the 1979 National Book Award and one of the nominees worldwide for the 2008 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, he is the author of eight previous novels, most recently The Whistling Season, and three works of nonfiction, including The House of Sky. He lives in Seattle.