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Part melodrama and part parable, Mitch Albom's The Five People You Meet in Heaven weaves together three stories, all told about the same man: 83-year-old Eddie, the head maintenance person at Ruby Point Amusement Park. As the novel opens, readers are told that Eddie, unsuspecting, is only minutes away from death as he goes about his typical business at the park. Albom then traces Eddie's world through his tragic final moments, his funeral, and the ensuing days as friends clean out his apartment and adjust to life without him. In alternating sections, Albom flashes back to Eddie's birthdays, telling his life story as a kind of progress report over candles and cake each year. And in the third and last thread of the novel, Albom follows Eddie into heaven where the maintenance man sequentially encounters five pivotal figures from his life (a la A Christmas Carol). Each person has been waiting for him in heaven, and, as Albom reveals, each life (and death) was woven into Eddie's own in ways he never suspected. Each soul has a story to tell, a secret to reveal, and a lesson to share. Through them Eddie understands the meaning of his own life even as his arrival brings closure to theirs.
Albom takes a big risk with the novel; such a story can easily veer into the saccharine and preachy, and this one does in moments. But, for the most part, Albom's telling remains poignant and is occasionally profound. Even with its flaws, The Five People You Meet in Heaven is a small, pure, and simple book that will find good company on a shelf next to It's A Wonderful Life. --Patrick O'Kelley
From Publishers Weekly
"At the time of his death, Eddie was an old man with a barrel chest and a torso as squat as a soup can," writes Albom, author of the bestselling phenomenon Tuesdays with Morrie, in a brief first novel that is going to make a huge impact on many hearts and minds. Wearing a work shirt with a patch on the chest that reads "Eddie" over "Maintenance," limping around with a cane thanks to an old war injury, Eddie was the kind of guy everybody, including Eddie himself, tended to write off as one of life's minor characters, a gruff bit of background color. He spent most of his life maintaining the rides at Ruby Pier, a seaside amusement park, greasing tracks and tightening bolts and listening for strange sounds, "keeping them safe." The children who visited the pier were drawn to Eddie "like cold hands to a fire." Yet Eddie believed that he lived a "nothing" life-gone nowhere he "wasn't shipped to with a rifle," doing work that "required no more brains than washing a dish." On his 83rd birthday, however, Eddie dies trying to save a little girl. He wakes up in heaven, where a succession of five people are waiting to show him the true meaning and value of his life. One by one, these mostly unexpected characters remind him that we all live in a vast web of interconnection with other lives; that all our stories overlap; that acts of sacrifice seemingly small or fruitless do affect others; and that loyalty and love matter to a degree we can never fathom. Simply told, sentimental and profoundly true, this is a contemporary American fable that will be cherished by a vast readership. Bringing into the spotlight the anonymous Eddies of the world, the men and women who get lost in our cultural obsession with fame and fortune, this slim tale, like Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, reminds us of what really matters here on earth, of what our lives are given to us for.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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This is a story about a man named Eddie and it begins at the end, with Eddie dying in the sun. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
This is a story about a man named Eddie and it begins at the end, with Eddie dying in the sun. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars
So So,
By
This review is from: The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Audio CD)
(...)Hmm. It is not as cheesy I thought it could be, and not as life changing as many make it out to be. There are a few ideas that are beautiful and could have been exploited, as well as quotation material that could have been brought farther with a bit more imagination. I'm not saying Mitch is not imaginative, he is just not as imaginative as he could be, which leads to a bit of boredom for a reader like me who' is looking for challenges.All the way through I kept waiting for that wonderful momentum, the paroxysm where you discover that everything was actually a lot more intricate than it initially had appeared to be, whilst all is being revealed to you, leaving your heart content or there to debate the choice of the author. Not the case. The climax comes early, as I believe that the people that Eddie meets at the beginning are far more interesting and wise than the ones met at the end. The voice of Eddie is extremely annoying (Thank you Mitch for having other characters speak, nice breaks they were). It took stubbornness on my part to get through to the end. Mitch explains the voice as being similar to his uncle's voice, as he wanted to bestow credit to his uncle; he apparently tried very hard to reproduce his uncle''s unique husky strong speech.(...) To see the rest of the review as well as many more interesting ones go to allwords.ca.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great and insightful book,
By
This review is from: The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Paperback)
Heaven is a very personal place. The visions of heaven from various religious traditions tap into hopes (and fears) of people past and present, but ultimately, just as the world is different for each of us, so too must heaven be. Throughout this difference, however, is a question that is perhaps one of the more universal longings in the history of humanity - the quest to find the meaning of life, and the meaning of our lives in particular. It is this longing that Mitch Albom, best known prior to this book for his wonderful writing in `Tuesdays with Morrie'.The tale begins at the end, not the beginning. Of course, in life, every ending is a beginning of some sort. The end here is the end of Eddie's life - Eddie, a veteran who has gone through times of trouble and tragedy as well as times of joy and optimism, didn't have the life he wanted. Like most people, what Eddie wanted shifted over time, and even when he got what he wanted, it was somehow lacking, or disappointing; on the other hand, there were unexpected things. Eddie got married, but as with most marriages, it didn't always live up to the dream of the initial love. However, his wife Marguerite remained the love of Eddie's life, and she was one of the five people he met in heaven. This was his closest relationship, but not the only important relationship in his life. Perhaps drawing on the idea of six degrees of separation, there are people connected to Eddie who are companion guides in heaven that Eddie didn't even realise he was connected to. There is the Blue Man, the side-show freak at the amusement park where Eddie worked; there was the captain from his military days; there was Ruby, for whom Ruby Pier, the amusement park's location, was named; and then there is final person, one that Eddie only knew as a shadow on earth, but who has the biggest impact, and is the one whose hands offer a very touching form of salvation. Each person has insights and lessons to share with Eddie. Sometimes they reinterpret the events of Eddie's life; sometimes they simply share their sides of the story, that give a fullness to the narrative of life. This is no easy glossing over of reality - none of the characters attempt to explain how, at the heart of it, life really is fair. Indeed, the Blue Man explains in no uncertain terms that life is not fair, stating that if it were, `no good person would ever die young.' There are issues of redemption and issues of forgiveness here, both of which are not easy to come by, nor always easy to accept. Eddie's life, like most of our lives, needs forgiveness, both in his own sense of life and action, and forgiveness for his own actions. He learns to forgive others as he learns that he himself can be forgiven. It is a powerful realisation. Albom draws the story together in an interesting fashion. The scenes in heaven are interwoven with scenes from earth, with analysis from the people and historical narrative and internal dialogue of Eddie's life. There are also pieces that show the life around Eddie, and how sometimes it works and doesn't work. In the end, life goes on for those Eddie left behind; despite the fact that he had no relatives and no monuments or legacies to leave behind (his few remaining friends worried about who was to pay for the funeral), in fact his actions at amusement park served purposes far beyond what Eddie could have dreamed. Despite the feeling that he had lived his life in go-nowhere, do-nothing job, he has in fact fulfilled a great purpose, explained by a little girl - `Children. You keep them safe.' His last act on earth was to save a little girl from an amusement park ride accident, but in fact, he had been doing that all along. Albom writes in parable form at times, and in sermon form at times, and in storytelling form at times. These weave together in a wonderful combination. `On earth...when you fell asleep, you sometimes dreamed your heaven and those dreams helped to form it. But there was no reason for such dreams now.' Eddie's existence goes on, as does the rest of the life of the world, in ways that we do not have the ability to follow. In our dreams, we can envision much; in Albom's writing is the stuff of dreams.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Five stars for The Five People,
By Reeda Reader (Canada) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Paperback)
Our book club recently picked three winners----something that NEVER happens. And needless to say, while we loved the other two---KITE RUNNER and McCrae's BARK OF THE DOGWOOD, we thought THE FIVE PEOPLE was the best, easiest to read, and most inspirational. Mitch Albom hit the nail on the head with his first book, and he's done just as well with the second one. This is a heartwarming story and there's something for everyone in this charming tale.Also highly recommended: Kite Runner and Bark of the Dogwood
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