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About the Book

The Last Lecture: The Legacy Edition Enhanced eBook

Last Lecture book cover

The classic bestseller, now updated and presented as a truly immersive multimedia reading experience. New features include:

In this enhanced eBook Legacy Edition, readers will be able to experience, firsthand, the energy and love of life that made Randy Pausch so inspiring. They will also be encouraged to think more deeply about how they can apply its messages in their own lives.


The Last Lecture goes beyond the now-famous lecture to inspire us all to live each day of our lives with purpose and joy

"We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand."

— 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 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.

Watch the lecture that inspired the book.

Listen to Randy read the Introduction of The Last Lecture [mp3].


Buy the Book in the U.S.

Hyperion Books is proud to publish The Last Lecture.

Buy the Audio Book in the U.S.

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Buy the Book in the U.K.

Hodder & Stoughton are proud to publish The Last Lecture in the U.K.

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