Heaven, an Unexpected Journey

Jim Woodford, a successful airline pilot and businessman with a loving family and substantial wealth, describes an emptiness that none of it could fill. He had never been religious and was ambivalent about faith. Then, he writes, he died: he lay clinically dead in a hospital bed for more than 11 hours, and his consciousness was carried to Heaven and to hell. His account describes what he saw and felt in both, including prayers that leave contrails across Heaven's sky, what he calls God's sticky love, the feel of hugging an angel, and the claws that tried to pull him into darkness. He says he came back changed, carrying what his soul had lacked. It was published in 2017.

A reader of The CEO Library named it, through an anonymous form, as one of the three best books they read in 2019.