‘Memory’s Encouragement’ by Rice’s Gorry explores how to discover significance in one’s life

Rice University News & Media

In a new book, Rice’s Tony Gorry recalls scenes from his earliest postwar childhood and adolescence, weaving his present reality with these images to unlock meaning hidden in the remembered moments. Gorry helps his mother, discovers his father’s combat heroics, goes on adventures with his dog, sleds, watches clouds and learns slowly about the world of a small town in New York and the attitudes and principles that govern his parents’ generation.
TONY GORRY
Published this month by Paul Dry Books, the 173-page memoir “Memory’s Encouragement” reveals that while these moments on their surface may appear “ordinary,” they point the way to a life well-lived.
“I began writing it when I was first diagnosed with leukemia about eight years ago,” said Gorry, the Friedkin Professor Emeritus of Management at Rice’s Jones Graduate School of Business. Prior to his retirement, he was also a professor of computer science and the director of the Center for Technology in Teaching and Learning at Rice.
“I thought about the ways in which my parents had faced adversity,” Gorry said. “And as I wrote some about their lives, I began to better understand aspects of my own. I published a short essay about my confrontation with leukemia that received quite a bit of attention, so I began to expand it as well. And soon I found I was integrating my experience as a teacher, researcher and consultant in some reflections on our lives in the ‘high-speed’ lane of the internet. Last I found myself returning to a piece I published in the Classical Journal on the challenges of learning ancient Greek. Over time, all these came together in my memoir that extends from my birth during the Second World War to the present day.”
Gorry also “remembers” events at which he was never present, such as the evening his parents first ...

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