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Five People is a powerful book, powerful enough to make one's inner snob feel a little uncomfortable, but in the end, it doesn't push back at you the way, say, Proust 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, 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.