Book Review--The Five People You Meet in Heaven, by Mitch Albom

I actually listened to this on audio, which I think I liked better than I would have liked reading it; the audio just really added something somehow (how's that for eloquent?). Anyway, this was really an amazing book, sad in a lot of places, but with an uplifting ending.

The story begins at the end of the life of an 83-year-man named Eddie. Eddie was the head of maintenance for an amusement park called Ruby Pier. His job was fixing things and making sure the rides were safe. He died trying to save a little girl when one of rides malfunctioned.

When Eddie gets to Heaven, he discovers that it is not as he expected. Instead of landing in some sort of paradise, he is to encounter five people who will explain his life to him. Some were people who were close to him, while some he barely knew or perhaps never knew at all, but they were people who knew who he was and had touched his life in some way. With each person he meets, Eddie learns about some part of his life and also takes away a specific lesson.

As I said, the book is sad in lots of places. Eddie had quite a lot of tragedy in his life. He was a war veteran, and the war really changed him, especially his experience of being a prisoner of war. It made him a more bitter person, especially since his leg had been injured and he walked with a limp afterwards. He had a very difficult relationship with his father, and he lost his wife at quite a young age. He had planned on studying engineering, but life circumstances and perhaps in own difficulty in adjusting after the war interfered with that. He ended up being head of maintenance at Ruby Pier just like his father, and he ended up feeling like he had done nothing with his life. I thought that, among other things, he was missing one very obvious point, which was that he was saving lives by making sure the rides were safe (that accident at the end wasn't something he could have forseen, from the sound of it).

Anyway, the book was very uplifting. Eddie comes to realize that his life did have meaning and that he touched more people than he ever knew. A simple message, but important and one that people often forget or never realize.