best-selling author, journalist, screenwriter, dramatist, radio and television broadcaster and musician. His books have sold over 30 million copies worldwide. Having achieved national recognition for his sports writing in the earlier part of his career, he is perhaps best known for the inspirational stories and themes that weave through his books, plays and films. He is also well-known for his philanthropic work in Detroit, Michigan
where he founded four charities.
Albom was born in Passaic, New Jersey
and briefly lived in Buffalo, New York
before moving back to Haddon Township, New Jersey
as a child, where he attended a synagogue led by Rabbi Albert L. Lewis
, the subject of his book, Have a Little Faith.
This is a story about a man named Eddie and it begins at the end, with Eddie dying in the sun. It might seem strange to start a story with an ending. But all endings are also beginnings. We just don't know it at the time.
No story sits by itself. Sometimes stories meet at corners and sometimes they cover one another completely, like stones beneath a river.
How do people choose their final words? Do they realize their gravity? Are they fated to be wise?
In the stories about life and death, the soul often floats above the goodbye moment, hovering over police cars at highway accidents, or clinging like a spider to hospital room ceilings. These are people who receive a second chance, who somehow, for some reason, resume their place in the world. Eddie, it appeared, was not getting a second chance.
It might have seemed ridiculous to anyone watching, this white-haired maintenance worker, all alone, making like an airplane. But the running boy is inside every man, no matter how old he gets.
"Ah." The Blue Man nodded. "Well people often belittle the place where they were born. But heaven can be found in the most unlikely corners. And heaven itself has many steps. This, for me, is the second. And for you the first."
"Your voice will come. We all go through the same thing. You cannot talk when you first arrive." He smiled. "It helps you listen."
"There are five people you meet in heaven," the Blue Man suddenly said. "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."
People think of heaven as a paradise garden, a place where they can float on clouds and laze in rivers and mountains. But scenery without solace is meaningless.
Young men go to war. Sometimes because they are have to, sometimes because they want to. Always, they feel they are supposed to. This comes from the sad, layered stories of life, which over the centuries have seen courage confused with picking up arms, and cowardice confused with laying them down.