Word: heaven
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...went on to sell more than 5.7 million copies in hardcover alone. It spent four straight years at the top of the New York Times best-seller list. Now the story is getting stranger: Albom has done it again, with a novel called The Five People You Meet in Heaven (Hyperion; 196 pages...
...hero of The Five People You Meet in Heaven is an 83-year-old amusement-park repairman named Eddie. Eddie is gruff and lonely and feels as if his life has been a waste. By the end of Chapter 1 Eddie is dead, having been killed trying to save a little girl from a runaway ride. We follow him into heaven. He doesn't meet Morrie there. Instead, he meets a guy with blue skin...
...blue guy worked at the amusement park too, in a freak show, and as a young boy Eddie inadvertently caused an auto accident that killed him. "There are five people you meet in heaven," the Blue Man explains. "Each of us was in your life for a reason. You may not have known the reason at the time, and that is what heaven is for. For understanding your life on earth." His theme, and Albom's, is the interconnectedness of all our lives, and the impossibility of knowing the consequences of our actions in the grand scheme of things...
...soon Albom will have to figure out what to do with some new royalties: Five People went back to press three times the first week it was on sale. Like Eddie, Albom has touched the lives of a lot of people he never even knew. If there is a heaven, he can expect to have around 5.7 million people waiting for him there...
...more likely to bump into Hitler, as played by a Russian actor, begging for forgiveness; or a snake handler with a boa constrictor that's meant to represent the serpent in Eden. This may be an unlikely setting for an art show, particularly one that's supposed to celebrate heaven, but don't tell that to Torsten Römer. "The tension between a place so burdened with history and a spiritual subject such as paradise is just so fitting," he says. The Alexanderplatz bunker was Berlin's largest civilian air-raid shelter, built to accommodate 3,000 people...