A Man After His Own Heart: A True Story

by Charles Siebert

Book Overview

Somewhere on this earth tonight, somewhere, I believe, not very far from me, there is a person whose heart I've touched. A person whose heart I've held in my hand. . . . So beginsA Man After His Own... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0609602217
• ISBN13: 9780609602218
• Release Date: April 2004
• Publisher: Crown Publishing Group (NY)
• Length: 274 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.7" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

Beautiful and Lyrical

Charles Siebert's book is stunningly beautiful and wonderfully lyrical in its prose, its focus and its intent to communicate Mr. Siebert's quest. As a man who lost his father at a too-young age, and frets about his own mortality, this book struck home like a scalpel, peeling back layers of emotion within myself. Be prepared for an intimate journey into Mr. Siebert's spiritual and actual heart, and into your own.

Heartfelt

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.

Science and Society

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.

Heart and Soul

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.