Review: 90 Minutes in Heaven by Don Piper

90 Minutes in Heaven is number 7 on the New York Times paperback non-fiction list for April 10, 2009. It starts off interestingly enough but then it becomes a mish mash of life snippets, jumping all over the timeline and reiterating points that were already made.

Don Piper is a Baptist minister who was involved in a brutal car accident on his way home from a religious conference in 1989. Chapter one gives an overview of the hours leading up to the accident. It is concise and matter of fact. It is easy to read and a good stage setting.

Chapter two describes heaven; or rather Mr. Piper's encounter which, by his own description, is more of a gatecrashing. He finds himself in a luminous place with iridescent gates before him and a crowd of people who have died throughout his life surrounding him. There are embraces, an overall feeling of great love, and understanding without speaking. The spirits, Piper included, loll around the gate for a while and just as he looks through into the Promised Land of streets paved with gold and colors so vibrant they can't be comprehended by the living he arrives back on earth.

Don Piper was pronounced dead a mere seven minutes after the initial accident when emergency medical teams arrived on the scene. His crushed body and vehicle were covered with a tarp for about an hour before another Baptist Preacher walked from his place in traffic and asked to pray for him. Dick Onerecker heard the voice of God tell him to pray for the man in the car despite the fact that he was dead. He made his way into the trunk area of the demolished Ford Escort and placed his hand on the shoulder of the corpse within. He prayed and sang hymns for all he was worth though he wasn't exactly sure what he was praying for until the man who had been dead began to sing along. At that moment the praying became a plea that there would be no major internal injury or deficit. After 90 minutes milling around outside the gate of heaven Don Piper came back to earth with his own song and a dance of emergency personnel who could not believe he was alive.

The rest of the book skips around through different periods of Don's recovery rather than following the time line style established in the first few chapters. He writes about the devices and methods that are used to put his body back together, unfortunately he doesn't explain them in one or two informative paragraphs instead providing dribs and drabs on various pages until you have a full picture. I was spending a lot of time rereading for things I thought I'd missed only to discover they didn't exist for another three pages. There is some surface examination of the frustration of being this severely injured and even a little spattering here and there about the depression that comes along with it but as you would expect from a man of God, his remedies are found through various aspects of his faith.

I've already given away the only good part of the book, but then so did the title. If you are interested in a first hand account of a "near death experience" sit down with the book at the store or in the library for a few minutes and you'll have it. Beyond the first few chapters the book is not well planned and frustrating to read. It is less about heaven and more about a preacher redefining what his religion means to him, for him, and what his mission here is. This is not a book about what happens when you die it's a book about what happens when you survive the most horrifyingly incapacitating physical injuries your structure can withstand. Like the process of recovering physically, mentally, and emotionally from these types of injuries the book is a jumbled mess.