The Heart: A Memoir

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Summary: Dynamics of Mortality: Morrow on Morrow and More
Review: Heart: A Memoir is Lance Morrow at his finest investigative journalism. He delves into the darkness of his own chest and his own past to mingle formative episodes from various plots along the timeline of his life with salient incidents in history -- uniting the events as metaphors for the heart and its machinations.

Morrow suffered heart attacks and bypass operations at the ages of thirty-six and fifty-three. His seventeen years of a second chance at life and his gracious third chance (whose duration has yet to be determined) left Morrow wondering about his place in the world.

He drifts effortlessly between past, present, and distant past -- plucking key incidents to illustrate the evolution of his life or draw parallelisms between rage nurtured in an individual's heart and the global atrocities of the Holocaust, the Balkans, Gaza, Hiroshima, and such. He commingles these brutalities with the goings-on at his farm in upstate New York: the natural interactions of animals and the role of death in their daily existences.

Morrow recounts specific deaths that have contributed to the sum of his understanding of the dynamics of mortality and the attendant issues that wrap themselves about the moment of death and remain in its aftermath. He delivers a masterful read that serves as both an autobiography and a dissertation on the role of death in life and the philosophy of recovery, of getting on with the task of living while life can be had.

NOTE TO OTHER REVIEWER: It's a memoir. It's an account of the memories of his life and the events that shaped it. It's natural the reader might feel the writer is "enmeshed with his own life."

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Summary: A talented writer but...
Review: This is a book that makes you realize publishers should have a new category: SELF-WHINE. Whereas Mr. Morrow is really an excellent writer, he is just so enmeshed with his own life. After the reader delves through his problems with his heart attacks (and that is sad), he has to throw in a tale about a stray cat that gets into his house. So he pulls out a shotgun to kill it. I have to admit I closed the book at this point but EVERY creature in life has the right to live, Mr. Morrow. Perhaps if you could get out of the importance of your own existence, you could see this.