John: Finally tonight, a sports writer turned author turned benefactor who puts love and hope at the center of nearly everything he does.

In our weekend spotlight, Mitch albom.

>> This is a new Hudson building.

John: Spending the day with Mitch albom in Detroit is not a leisurely experience.

At Detroit water ice factory, the non-profit dessert store that he started to help fund his humanitarian work, he whips up a motown twist with his namesake, Mr.

Mitch's chocolate peanut butter.

Then, a stop at say Detroit play, a one-time abandoned city rec center that albom transformed into a multi-million-dollar learning center for hundreds of school students where academics come before play.

Mitch: We're not going to build something that's good enough for a poor neighborhood in Detroit.

We're going to build something that's good enough for the best neighborhood in all of Michigan.

If you deliver high expectations, you'll get high performances.

If you come in with low expectations, oh, this is good enough, that's exactly the performances you're going to get.

All I did was kind of get it going, but you know, they take the ball and run with it, and you can see it's a lot of joy here.

John: While there, the one-time professional musician shows us his talents on the piano.

He's never had a lesson.

In between stops, he takes a call from the orphanage he's run in Haiti since after the devastating 2010 earthquake.

>> This is actually my second time around in life.

John: All of that is before two hours behind a microphone for his long-running, daily radio afternoon show on Detroit station wjr.

And after the three hours every morning that he devotes to writing.

Albom's books have sold 42 million copies.

His latest, a novel entitled "Twice," was published this week.

It's about a boy who can go into the past in order to have a second chance at things, except when it comes to love.

Your protagonist, alfie Logan, from Philadelphia.

You're a philly boy.

You started out as a musician turned to writing.

Are there other similarities?

Mitch: Yes, most of alfie's screw-ups with girls were based on personal experience.

John: And alfie has the power to go back in time.

Redo things.

Mitch: There's a scene in the book where he goes up to this cute blonde girl who he kind of has a crush on.

And he starts talking with his hands and hits a glass of milk and knocks it into her lap.

And she looks up with that, oh my god, and he just says, look at that and walks away.

And that is exactly what happened to me.

If you want to write about a teenager with embarrassing moments in his romantic life, and you already have them in your own life, why not use them?

Why make up something else if they work?

John: Tell us how he discovers his power.

Mitch: They're living in Africa, and he is supposed to sit with his mother who's sick, and she's in one of those mosquito netting beds, and he goes and sees that she's sleeping, and his father's out, and he says, well, she's asleep, I'll just go out and play.

He realizes his mother died while he was out.

And he's so upset by this that when he wakes up the next morning, it's the day before.

And his father says, go sit with your mother, and he goes, what do you mean?

He says sit with mother, and he walks in, and she's there again, and it's replaying all over.

It was a very poignant scene for me because my mother had a stroke, and then a series of strokes, that robbed her of the ability to speak for the last several years of her life.

And so, I never had that last conversation with her because I didn't know the stroke was coming.

And then I had gone out to see her, and I flew back home, and when I landed, I got a phone call that she had died while I was in the air.

And there's a line in the book that says alfie, who was running around with a cape, a Superman cape on, just jumping up and down, and he says, "My mother died while I was trying to fly."

And I don't think most people know, or maybe I'm telling you, but my mother died while I was flying.

And so, yeah, that scene kind of choked me up a little bit.

Set the stage for the book, though.

John: It was as a "Detroit free press" sports columnist in the 1980's that albom first gained prominence.

His 1997 worldwide best-seller, "Tuesdays with morrie," brought broader recognition.

An account of his weekly visits with a beloved former professor who was dying, it's one of the best-selling memoirs of all time.

Mitch: I just start with what I want to write about, and then create a story around it.

For example, the five people you meet in heaven, people have always thought, oh, you want to write about heaven after morrie.

That wasn't really true.

I wanted to write a story about people who think they don't matter.

So, I kind of pick the themes before I start.

And the theme for this one was that grass is always greener.

I wanted to write a book that showed that even if you had the ability, the magical ability to go back in time and change it, you might find a whole new set of problems.

And you might find that you miss what you learned from what you thought was a mistake.

John: While not all love stories, many of albom's books have lessons about love, hope and optimism.

So many of my friends I told I was coming to do this said what they love about your books is the sense of hope and optimism that runs through all of them.

In America today, with so much division, so many troubles, is it hard to keep that hope and optimism?

Mitch: No, I actually find it's more necessary and it's somewhat easier because it's almost a counter to what's going on.

I think that everybody wants hope and everybody wants inspiration.

When people take out their wallets, they pull out a picture of their grandson or their child or whatever.

They don't pull out picture of the woe or their misery or how awful life is.

Here, let me show you how awful, how dark life is, but they aspire to hope.

John: Since 2010, albom has given hope to hundreds of impoverished orphans in port-au-prince, Haiti.

He and an army of volunteers rebuilt an orphanage heavily damaged by the earthquake.

He spends a week there every month.

Mitch: I did not know what I was doing.

I'll admit that at the beginning.

I didn't have children of my own.

I didn't even know diaper changing or a lot of that stuff, but I learned it.

And the kids are the absolute joys of our lives.

And the purpose for myself and my wife, I'm sure that we were put on this Earth for.

John: Albom and his wife of 30 years, Janine, became parents to two children from Haiti.

Just one instance when he says he's been given a second chance.

Mitch: There's more to this than just a love story and a novel.

I have come to realize that my life has been the embodiment of second chances.

If you look at it from 30,000 feet, you know, I was a musician and I thought that's all I wanted to do and I failed at it.

And I kind of took up writing because there was nothing else to do.

But look at what writing has given me.

We don't have children.

We get married late.

It doesn't happen for us.

We figure out we're going to be a couple that doesn't have children.

And then, an orphanage comes into our lives and then this little girl named chica needs our help because she has a brain tumor and she becomes our daughter for two years and then we lose her.

And we figure, oh my goodness, you know, that was our chance.

That was our child.

And then a few years ago, a little girl is brought to us who weighs six pounds at six months and has had nothing to eat but sugar water.

And I hold her in my hand and she fits in one hand and her eyes are closed and she can't speak and she can barely move and we don't think, we just say we have to save her life.

She's our little girl and we have this second chance with another beautiful little child full of life.

What did I do to deserve all these second chances?

Who's watching over me that's saying, you're on this way but we're going to take you this way.

So, this is a kind of a celebration of what life can be like if you understand what went wrong with the first time and you try to make it right the second time and I am a walking example of that.