Tuesdays With Morrie, Mitch Albom, 1997

Rating: 5/10
Like The Five People You Meet In Heaven, this book's storyline compels one to pick it up immediately. Like the other book, this one attempts to intersperse a story with thoughtful comments and makes one sit back and think through certain aspects of life. However, unlike the other book, Tuesdays With Morrie ultimately degenerates into one of those countless self-help books, and that's very disappointing. This book has been highly recommended by many respectable publications and individuals, but for me this is a 5/10 at best.

Mitch Albom says this is his real-life experience with his favourite university professor, Morrie Schwartz, during the latter's last days. The book discusses 14 Tuesdays when Mitch visits Morrie who discourses on various issues such as the marriage, family, money, aging and death. Mitch mixes the professor's challenges during his last days, mainly his inability to perform daily tasks, with the discourses. To my mind, this is where the book fails. It tries to be too many things in a short package - it tries to be a self-help book on too many issues and he tries to interweave a story in between, resulting in a somewhat superficial analysis of important human issues.

Pros: Interesting setting, well-meaning

Cons: Tries to pack in too many things

Blink, Malcolm Gladwell, 2005

Rating: 7/10

You have to hand it to Malcolm Gladwell - he has taken a subject that most of us would lazily dismiss as "intuition", and has written a substantial and a fairly engrossing book on it. He starts off laying out three objectives - to convince the reader that "blink" decisions are as good as any; to enable the reader to figure out when to trust such decisions and when not to; and finally, to help understand how such decisions can actually be controlled. To his credit, he has written a cohesive and well-structured book that attempts to do exactly that.

One of the fascinating aspects in this book for me was the wide and diverse nature of the anecdotal stories that he has used to bolster his arguments. these anecdotes range from military war games to speed-dating, from Herman Miller chairs to cola wars, from gamblers to trombone players in orchestras, and from autism to shootouts in the Bronx.

On the flip side, one of the pitfalls in stretching a thin subject line to a full-fledged book is that of belaboring a point .... and Gladwell does that at times. Huh? We get it. Can we now move on please?

Finally, what prevents this book from going over a 7/10 for me is that there were no real takeaways for , counter to Gladwell's claim of the potential to end up with "a different and better world" - a claim he makes in the introductory chapter itself. Sure, it's a fascinating read but there were no learnings at the end of it. However, just for his use of diverse anecdotes, it was worth the time spent in reading this book for me.

Pros: Cohesively structured, fascinating anecdotes

Cons: Points are belabored at times

The Five People You Meet in Heaven, Mitch Albom, 2003

Rating: 7/10

The thing that struck me most about this book was the novelty of the premise. An old man, who was injured at war and who spent most of his life as a maintenance worker in an amusement park and consequently feels embittered and conscious of a wasted life, dies and goes to heaven. But heaven is not what one usually associates it with - a lovely place with young, beautiful people frolicking around. Instead, it comprises a collection of everyday places where the dead person meets five people who influenced his life significantly - these five could be familiar people or complete strangers and could even have affected his life in ways that he was never aware. The authour intersperses these meetings with events from different birthdays in the old man's life, that adds to the narration.

To the author's credit, his treatment of this basic premise does justice to it. The book is basically about these five meetings and how they help lay the demons in the old man's life to rest. At the end of it all, he understands the reasons for the key events in his life, he makes peace with people who he thought had wronged him, and most importantly, he understands the purpose of what he thought was a mundane existence. The book is a short one and a breezy read.

If the book had any faults in my view, it was the tendency to get descriptive with landscapes, etc. which distracts and irritates to an extent, but these descriptions are mercifully less in number.

Parts of this book will fall into the "cheesy" or "mushy" genre; if you get totally put out by that, this may not be the book for you. On the other hand, if you are the type who'd want to discuss with your spouse/friends over a bottle of wine who these five people in your life could be, you'd rate this 10 on 10. For me, this is a 7 on 10 and it works.

Pros: Innovative story, clever narrative style, feel-good ending, short and breezy read

Cons: Unnecessarily descriptive in some places, "cheesy" at times