Memoir · 2026

Falling
With
Purpose

He came to Harvard with a strategy for everything — and met the woman who showed him what he'd missed. A memoir of a Jewish-German romance, and the fifty-year life that followed.

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Early Reader Reviews

Love, Marriage, and One Impossible Question

What makes you the person I want to see at breakfast? She asked it once. It changed everything.

A Man, a Country, and the Long Road to Himself

From the coal-dusted Ruhr Valley to Harvard — what must be lost before you know who you are.

Ambition, Clarity, and the Art of Durchblick

The German word for seeing through confusion to what matters. In business, it's an advantage. In life, it's everything.

Critical Acclaim

"A life story told with extraordinary honesty and hard-won grace. Norkus writes with the clarity of someone who has earned every word."

— Kirkus Reviews

What Readers Are Saying

"Quietly profound. A love story wrapped inside a larger story about what America offers those brave enough to choose it."

— Publishers Weekly

"The Jewish-German relationship at the center of this book is unforgettable. Norkus renders the impossible with rare grace and courage."

— NPR Books

"I read it in two sittings and thought about it for weeks. One of the most human books I've encountered in years."

— BookPage
Falling With Purpose by Michael Norkus — book cover

About the Book

The Memoir

In the fall of 1973, Michael Norkus — a young German at Harvard Business School, son of the postwar Ruhr Valley — walked into a café on the Square and met Andrea Gluck, a Jewish-American doctoral student reading Siddhartha. He reached for her jacket collar to help her off with it. She told him, simply, to ask first. Something clicked. It was the beginning of a fifty-year marriage, and the education of a lifetime.

Falling With Purpose tells two stories that became one: the Ruhr Valley roots that forged the man, and the love that showed him what he was for. Running through both is Durchblick — a German word for the ability to see clearly through confusion — which Michael spent his career applying to business, and fifty years learning to apply to love.

  • Durchblick
  • Jewish-German Romance
  • Immigration
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Purpose
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Michael Norkus, author of Falling With Purpose
Michael Norkus

The Author

Michael Norkus

Born in 1946 in the postwar Ruhr Valley, Michael Norkus came to Harvard Business School in 1973 and met Andrea Gluck — a Jewish-American doctoral student — at a café on the Square. Their fifty-year marriage became the proving ground for everything that followed: a career at Boston Consulting Group, a business built in America, a family raised across two languages and two histories.

He spent decades applying strategic clarity to the outer world. It took longer to understand that the same clarity, turned inward, leads to a simpler answer. At 80, he wrote it all down for the first time.

"The why is love. Not as something solved. As something chosen."

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For Book Clubs & Reading Groups

Reading With Your Group?

Falling With Purpose was written to be discussed. The Jewish-German love story at its heart, the immigrant journey, and the search for purpose at 80 spark powerful conversations.

Your Planning Kit, Delivered

A beautifully formatted 12-question discussion guide and a one-sheet PDF are emailed to your organizer before the meeting — ready to print, share, or pull up on your phone.

Questions That Go Deep

The love story, the immigrant journey, building a life and a business from scratch — these questions take your group beyond the book and into conversations you won't forget.

The Experience

Michael Can Join Your Group — Live!

The author himself joins your Zoom call for 30–45 minutes of live Q&A. He shares the stories behind the stories, answers every question, and gives your group something most readers never get: direct access to the person who lived it.

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Michael joins your meeting on Zoom

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