The Heart: A Memoir

By Lance Morrow

An award-winning essayist for Time magazine reflects on his life as a father and husband, his childhood in a family of journalists, and his career covering some of the world's most dangerous places.... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0446518700
• ISBN13: 9780446518703
• Release Date: January 1995
• Publisher: Warner Books (NY)
• Length: 323 Pages
• Weight: 1.26 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.3" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

Dynamics of Mortality: Morrow on Morrow and More

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."