Word: albom
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...least 5.7 million people--plus everybody who saw the TV movie or the off-Broadway play--already know the story of Morrie Schwartz, Albom's Brandeis professor who died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Albom, who gave up jazz to become a sportswriter, still seems a little shell-shocked by Morrie's success. Six years of having complete strangers come up to you and bare their souls will do that. "Before that whole experience," Albom says, "if I walked through an airport and somebody recognized me, they'd always say, 'Who's going to win the World Series...
...person Albom is a small, intense guy with a large, handsome head; he bears a strong resemblance to a bobble-head doll. He has become the king of a certain highly potent brand of uplifting, inspirational wisdom--in the words of his friend the novelist Amy Tan, he is "the rabbi of everybody." Maybe it's an easy, sentimental kind of wisdom, but it is a kind for which there is an obvious, urgent, demonstrable need. And Albom does his best to live by it. He used the profits from Morrie to pay his professor's medical bills...
...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...
Five People is a harsher and maybe more honest book than Morrie. Morrie was about understanding life. Five People is about accepting the fact that true understanding is not the lot of the living. "Everybody walks around with a bunch of questions that aren't answered," Albom says, sounding genuinely upset about it. "And they never get the answers. They just go right through to the end of their life and never...
...does: the truths it offers aren't difficult to understand or accept, and for all we know they may not even be true. They're just, in a profound way, what we want to hear, and there's solace in that, and solace isn't to be sneezed at. Albom is no Jonathan Franzen, but you don't see anybody grabbing Franzen around the knees at O'Hare. Pretty 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...