Thanks to NetGalley for this ARC!

I am a big fan of the author and his writing, and HEART did not disappoint. There were many facts about the heart (some obscure, some not) interspersed throughout the book to complement patient stories. We read about the author as a young boy and his personal desire to work in cardiology, stemming from the story of a relative’s death during his formative years. The author comes across as a caring and knowledgeable doctor with a kind bedside manner – there are no veiled frustrations or jabs at ornery patients, as I have read in other medical books.

One of the best things about the book is that it’s part history, part medicine, part almost-gory-but-not-overly-done, and part philosophy. Each chapter can stand alone and be read a few days apart without having to remember the plot or which patient he is discussing. Thoughtful illustrations are added to underscore the meaning of the chapters, and footnotes are added to provide explanations or information without slowing down the flow of the narrative. The book strikes a great balance of science and interesting plot without slowing down the narrative with a lot of detail that the average reader without a medical background wouldn’t understand. For someone like me, with a medical background, there were also enough facts to keep me interested. Some books minimize details to make it easy for the reader; Jauhar does not do that. This makes his books fascinating and eminently readable. ( )

I picked up this book from the library. I had seen it on the shelf in the new books area and passed it by originally but then it was featured as the first book of 2019 for the PBS Newshour/New York Times Book Review Now Read This book club and I decided to read it.

I found similarities to the two books I have read by Dr. Siddharta Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies and The Gene in that Dr. Jauhar writes not only about his experiences as a cardiologist but also his own personal struggle with a genetic predisposition to heart disease. I connected with Dr. Mukherjee's books because I had a stepfather who I watched struggle with and ultimately die from an aggressive cancer, the subject of Mukherjee’s first book, and I connected with The Gene because, like Dr. Mukherjee's sibling, my father was diagnosed with schizophrenia.

I found myself knowing very little about the heart and this book was eye-opening and interesting. I am always surprised at what I don't know when I read books about medically related subjects. The history of how we have come to know what we know about the human body and many of the recent advancements in medicine come with a price. It is sometimes a bit excruciating to read about how the first efforts at doing surgical procedures on the heart came about and if it bothers you to hear about experiments on animals and specifically dogs, you might want to avoid this book. It would have been a lot less gruesome but there was no way to do computer modeling or use virtual reality 50 or more years ago.

Overall, like all well-written popular science books I learned something new and I found this to be a quick, interesting read. ( )

In spite of Jauhar's acknowledgement thanks to his editor for reminding him that the book was to be "about the heart, not the heart surgeon," they didn't always enforce that plan. The book wanders from his own experiences, to history, to a much-too-long disquisition on the electrophysiology of the heart, back to himself, and then it just ends. If you are interested in medical history, there are some dramatic tales of the first time surgeons dared to actually cut into the living, beating heart, carefully timing cuts and stitches to the beat. There is a disturbing and detailed description of a student project where he attempts to capture, pith and study a living frog, which ends up a horror show; he seems to feel proud to tell you how upsetting it was for him. But there is no similar acknowledgement of the many, many dogs who are anesthetized, incised, and euthanized in the cardiac surgery studies he refers to. These studies of course helped lead to improvements and treatments for heart diseases of many kinds, but if the frog distressed him so, he seems to have gotten over it pretty thoroughly. I trolled dutifully through the book, but somehow it never grabbed me. Libraries will want this for their health and medicine collections, but I'm glad I could borrow it from them and not buy it. ( )

If there is one thing that you need more than your brain, then it is your heart. Over the course of a normal life, the heart will beat around 115,00 times a day which equates to 42 million times a year. Over your lifetime it will pump a staggering 158 million litres of blood. For years was seen as the centre of our soul too, but that attitude changed with the rise of scientific understanding of the way it worked. But what goes around comes around and modern research has shown how the heart can react and change shape as it reacts to feeling and trauma. It is the organ that is the very centre and essence of us.

Sandeep Jauhar has a close affinity with this organ, not only is he a practising cardiologist, but he only needs to go back to his grandparent's generation to find the roots of his own heart issues. That journey from them to him will take us to the pioneers and mavericks who have discovered so much about it. There is William Harvey who discovered that the blood flowed down the arteries and somehow passed through the flesh and was pumped back up the veins. Inge Edler who made the connection that ultrasound that was being used to find battleships could also be used on the heart to see it working and John Heysham Gibbon who spent thirty years of his life developing a heart and lung machine to oxygenate the blood, opening the doors to being able to perform surgery on the heart without the patient dying. This and many other innovations and groundbreaking advances have lead us to the point where we move ever closer to the artificial heart.

This is a good overview with enough depth in it too for the casual reader of how we have got to where we are now with our understanding and treatment of the heart. There is also Jauhar's personal story of heart disease in his own family and how it impacts his health, but how these diseases have affected all sorts of people from all levels of society. ( )

Sandeep Jauhar has been fascinated by the heart since he was a small boy. Lucky for him that he has been able to pursue a career as a highly trained cardiologist. And lucky for us that he is able to write. This book is a relatively small volume and the writing begins rather simply. As the book progresses he subtly introduces more complex, thought provoking ideas.

History and culture imbue the human heart with a great deal of metaphoric and physical significance. To many it embodies the seat of emotion, the core of the soul, and it is the linchpin between life and death. Because of the heart's physical vulnerability, medical treatment was largely unexplored until the end of the 19th century. Dr. Jauhar chronicles the history of experimental and clinical cardiology with details of the (mostly) men who doggedly challenged physiological frontiers, sometimes to the point of their own demise.

The central part of the book looks at the heart as a complex machine, with each chapter focusing on aspects of that machine: as a pump, a generator, wiring, etc. The writing is clear and accessible to a layperson. His goal is to foster understanding in the general public and he does that well. He takes us step wise through the development of the clinical understanding of those aspects of the heart and the treatments derived from that understanding.

Woven through the narrative is the author's family history of heart disease and the impact those events on him and his family. Human emotion and the heart is a secondary theme throughout the book and he ends the book on that chord. After many years of clinical practice during rapid advances in surgical and pharmacological treatment of the heart, the author opines that we are at the point of diminishing returns in those areas. Perhaps the next great advances in the prevention and treatment of heart disease will come from our ability as a species to address the psychological, social, and political roots that lead to promoting the health and well being of our hearts. ( )