A Man After His Own Heart : A True Story

Rating:
Summary: Science and Society
Review: I am a very enthusiastic reader of medical memoirists such as Nuland, Solomon, and Seltzer, and after reading A Man After His Own Heart I'd place Siebert immediately in the same company, and a step better for the exceptional writing. These authors act as literary mediators between the general readership and science and health, where cultural myths and the obscurity of technical information cloud essential understanding of our bodies and ourselves, and ultimately of our own mortality, and perhaps worse, how our genetics may be used to marginalize us and our families. With all the personal pain and difficulty, struggling with the death of a father, and perhaps a genetic death sentence, Siebert, as a journalist, connects in a Whitmanesque way with people all over America suffering from heart disease, in its variants. Reading Siebert's book put me in mind of how critical it is to find a link between science and society, and how desperately we need such gifted authors.

Rating:
Summary: Heartfelt
Review: I finally had the chance to read this book, which has been sitting on my night table for a while. Some books are easily forgettable - sometimes you can't even remember if you've read it or not. That is not the case with this beautifully written memoir - it has evoked feelings in me that remain strong even though a few weeks have passed. My father had an aortic valve replacement last year, and I've had my own episodes of arrhythmia and tachycardia, so I felt a real connection with both the science and emotion regarding the heart. The personal recollections are both honest and real, and kept me wanting more. It's such a delight to find a writer who is courageous enough to let the readers in for a glimpse into his personal relationships.

Rating:
Summary: Heart and Soul
Review: Never have scientific and personal oddysseys been so deftly woven into whole cloth. Charles Siebert has allowed us to share a personal journey motivated by emotion but marked by intellectual discovery. Apparently, Mr. Seibert is a poet as well as a writer of prose, and his lyricism transforms material that might otherwise be drily academic into the stuff of poetry. And what better subject than the heart? The center, presumably, of our emotional life as well as the focus of complex science and medicine. All of this takes place in this book within the vehicle of a heart transplant operation, which provides a narrative movement that keeps the reader turning the pages. On the path of this riveting account of the writer's personal experience with a heart transplant team, there are surreal landscapes humanized by the characters embodying the scientific and medical details as well as personal landscapes, including Mr. Siebert's confrontations and reconciliations with his own heart and his father's failing heart, all vivified by factual understanding. The special effects in this book are real, making the reader see that knowledge is the true landscape of the imagination. Science has long been seen as the enemy of the spirit; here is one writer who marries the two with astounding results. Artificial hearts, transplanted hearts, broken hearts, and loving hearts: anyone with a heart will love this book.

Rating:
Summary: So close....
Review: This book is beautifully written. After finding out about my own congenital heart 'irregularity' I was very interested in the topic. I was engrossed in the story and descriptions about his Father, his siblings, and his own confrontation with his heart 'problems'. I read the book in a day and about 2/3 of the way through I became disappointed. The story shifts from his personal landscape to the 'heart history' he researched in London and to the medical procedure he witnesses. I kept reading, hoping he would deliver the emotional lessons he learned about his own heart or about himself or about his relationship with his Father. But he did not. In the end his beautiful words eclipsed the meaning.