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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.
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.
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Inside This Book
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First Sentence:
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 Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Ruby Pier, Blue Man, Crazy Three, Crazy Two, Freddy's Free Fall, Mickey Shea, Lester Street, Crazy Four, Crazy One, Jersey Finch, Parisian Carousel New!
Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Front Flap | First Pages | Back Flap | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
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 Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Ruby Pier, Blue Man, Crazy Three, Crazy Two, Freddy's Free Fall, Mickey Shea, Lester Street, Crazy Four, Crazy One, Jersey Finch, Parisian Carousel New!
Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Front Flap | First Pages | Back Flap | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Citations (learn more)
This book cites 2
books:
32
books
cite this book:
See all 32 books citing this book
- Independence Day (Best Holiday Books) by Willma Willis Gore on page 122
- Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life's Greatest Lesson by Mitch Albom in Front Matter
- XML For Dummies by Lucinda Dykes on page 27, page 29, and page 60
- The Seeker's Way: Cultivating the Longings of a Spiritual Life by Dave Fleming in Back Matter (1), and Back Matter (2)
- Here On The Way To There: A Catholic Perspective On Dying And What Follows by William H. Shannon on page 127, and Back Matter
- Fatherless Sons: Healing the Legacy of Loss by Jonathan Diamond Ph.D. on page 197, and Back Matter
- The Undertaker's Wife: Wisdom and Musings; Life in a Small Town Funeral Home by Celia M. Hastings on page 62, and Back Matter
See all 32 books citing this book
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Beta (What's this?)The Five People You Meet in Heaven
The Five People You Meet in Heaven is an interesting place to begin a discussion about the concept of spirit and the afterlife. Do we go on in some form after death? Is there an afterlife? If Einstein is correct and all the energy in the universeis ...
Created on Feb 26, 2006, last edited on Aug 12, 2006.
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