Review:The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom

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?"

This was a reread for me. I first read this book when I was in Africa, and It made an impression on me. I was feeling kind of down a few weeks ago so I read it again. This is one of those books that no matter what kind of mood you are in, it will bring a smile to your face.

The plot is simple. A man dies, and he meets the five people that most had an impact on his life. However, it goes deeper than that. It will make you think of the people that had an impact on you and the impact that you have had on them. It is not always who-who believe it would be either. The part that I liked most is that even though he feels like he has wasted his life in the end he was excakly where he was supposed to be. He found out that he did have a big impact on people. Often we think that we lead small lives when in reality we are making an enormous impact. We should not fail to underestimate what we deem insignificant. This was a fast little book that you could read in a couple of hours, but its impact will be there long after you have finshed.