Mitch Albom: More Than a Sportswriter

If you ask anyone interested in sports who Mitch Albom is, they will tell you he is a famous sportswriter and radio personality.  He has written about sports for ESPN and national magazines for most of his career, and he continues to have a radio show in Detroit.  But wait, there is so much more to the man.  He is a writer of novels and memoirs, teacher and philanthropist.

When I first read Tuesdays with Morrie many years ago, I had never heard of Mitch Albom.  He wrote Tuesdays with Morrie after spending several years, every Tuesday, with his mentor and teacher from Syracuse University, Morrie Schwartz, who was dying from ALS.  It is a heartwrenching book.  It has sold more copies than any other memoir in history, or so I've been told.

I thought about Mitch Albom as I was reading his newest book, Chika.  It's the story of his relationship with a little girl he met in a Haitian orphanage after the earthquake in 2010.  He brought the child to Detroit, as she could not be treated for her brain tumor in Haiti.  I was so touched by his relationship with Chika and ultimately his charitable work in Haiti, that I had to blog about it.  He took over running Have Faith Haiti, an orphanage that had been in existence for many years, but fell on hard times after the 2010 earthquake.  He goes to Haiti once a month to visit the children.  In addition to the charity in Haiti, he is on the board and involved in several other charities.  He is a sports journalist, a writer, and above all, a philanthropist, one I admire for his great skill as a writer, and his huge heart.