The Five People You Meet In Heaven

Details of the Book

No. of Pages   : 196 pages

Publisher        : Hyperion

ISBN               : 1401308589 (ISBN13: 9781401308582)

From the book blurb

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, but an answer.

In heaven, five people explain your life to you. Some you knew, others 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?"

Author

Mitchell David Albom is an author, journalist, screenwriter, playwright, radio and television broadcaster and musician. His books have collectively sold over 35 million copies worldwide; have been published in forty-one territories and in forty-two languages around the world; and have been made into Emmy Award-winning and critically-acclaimed television movies.

What I think

The book begins with the death of Eddie and then goes on narrating the circumstances that leads to his death. Eventually, it moves into his afterlife in heaven and the people he meets. These people help him understand why his life was in certain ways and not in certain other ways. Incidentally, the people he meets includes both those he knows and doesn’t know. At the end of it he realizes that his life was not as bad as he was thinking.

We are introduced to Eddie as an old man who handles the maintenance of Ruby Pier; who lives his life on a rehearsed routine. After his death, the five people he meets gives a view about his childhood, manhood, miseries, love, family, ambitions and so on.

In the heaven, Eddie meets five people, as the book’s title rightly hints. They teach a message to Eddie about his own life, thereby adding a different perspective to the events that has left a lasting impression in his life.

·         They teach that one person’s life is interconnected with another, thereby explaining why one is dead and other goes on living.

·         Sacrifice is a part of life. You sacrifice for someone. Someone else would sacrifice for you.

·         Forgiveness is the only means for peaceful life.

·         Love is eternal; cannot be ended by death.

·         If your life is in certain ways, there is a reason for it. So accept it!

The narrative is simple and oscillated between the present, immediate past and Eddie’s several birthdays. Such a unique style of narrative and the simple language will not let you bored. Although the book is about Eddie’s life and death, it surely has interesting takeaway for everyone.

I read it in one go.

Give it a shot!

Rating

3/5

Some words that stole my heart

©       All endings are also beginnings. We just don't know it at the time."

©       "Holding anger is a poison...It eats you from inside...We think that by hating someone we hurt them...But hatred is a curved blade...and the harm we do to others...we also do to ourselves."

©       "Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you're not really losing it. You're just passing it on to someone else."

©       "The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone."

©       "There are no random acts...We are all connected...You can no more separate one life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind..."

©       "Every life has one true love snapshot."