The Five People You Meet in Heaven

Product Description

Plot Eddie is a wounded war veteran, an old man who has lived, in his mind, an uninspired life. His job is fixing rides at a seaside amusement park. On his 83rd birthday, a tragic accident kills him, as he tries to save a little girl from a falling cart. He awakes in the afterlife, where he learns that heaven is not a destination. It's a place where your life is explained to you by five people, some of whom you knew, others who may have been strangers. One by one, from childhood to soldier to old age, Eddie's five people revisit their connections to him on earth, illuminating the mysteries of his "meaningless" life, and revealing the haunting secret behind the eternal question: "Why was I here?" Personal Details Collection Status In Collection Index 10 Read It Yes Links Amazon US Product Details LoC Classification PS3601.L335F59 2003 Dewey 813/.6
Product Details

* Amazon Sales Rank: #1274 in Books
* Published on: 2003-09
* Released on: 2003-09-23
* Original language: English
* Number of items: 1
* Binding: Hardcover
* 198 pages

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
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.

From AudioFile
"I'm especially proud to have an audio version of this book, since it harkens back to the way my first stories came to me--not by the written page, but by other people's voices." That's Mitch Albom himself in his introduction. This writer's commitment to the aural tradition is clearly demonstrated in the sophistication with which his book is presented. Erik Singer's virtuoso performance is set off with musical interludes and background noises that are diverting but never distracting. The teaching parable is built around an 83-year-old war vet turned maintenance man who dies trying to save the life of a little girl. This is at the Ruby Point Amusement Park. "All endings are also beginnings. We just don't know it at the time..." B.H.C. 2004 Audie Award Finalist © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
Customer Reviews

The Five People You Meet in Heaven5
Another great book by Mitch Albom! Thought provoking! Which five people from my past will be waiting for me? We all need to do more sacrifice! Loved it!

Worth Thinking About4
I appreciated this story a lot more after re-reading it. It does, at first, seem as sappy as many reviewers have said, but on a second look, the author does convey some strong ideas well. Behind every person that we brush past--sometimes without noticing--is a story. The main character, Eddie, of course, is the kind of gruff, broken old man that nobody notices, but we see he was once a war hero who ended up trapped in a dead end because of his duty to country and family.
Along those lines, I thought the two most impressive of Eddie's "five people," were the Blue Man and Ruby, primarily because he didn't know either one of them. The Blue Man's story is a tragic one--reduced to being a freak and basically losing his human dignity. Ruby reminds Eddie that the run-down amusement park in which he wastes his life was once a somebody's grand dream.
The choice of a broken-down amusent park, which seemed pretty bizarre as a setting, I guess was a good choice. Both the workers and customers would be the kind of people you don't stop to give a second thought.
While I appreciate the story more, I still find the ending a bit cheesy and tacked on. Albom has made a good case that we're all interconnected in many ways we don't realize, why ruin that good observation by giving Eddie's life some overarching purpose that, basically, sounds more like an amusement park safety commercial? Likewise, he goes a little bit overboard with the interconnections--like Ruby's grandson's key?
Anyway, worth reading and thinking about at least parts of this story.

Wonderful5
I knew this would be good, and it was great. If you have extra time, read it.