Heartsounds: The Story Of A Love And Loss
Heartsounds: The Story Of A Love And Loss
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HEARTSOUNDS is a book filled with love and fury, a celebration of life---and a defiant roar against death. It probes so deeply the emotional recesses of a man and a woman, and touches so many universal nerves, that to read it is to live an experience of overwhelming intensity.
Harold Lear, a prominent surgeon, was stricken at age 53 by a massive heart attack. Then came more heart attacks, open-heart surgery and post-surgical complications which defied diagnosis. Martha Lear was a journalist. Suddenly the doctor was a powerless patient, viewing all of medicine from the other side. What he saw astonished and enrage him. Suddenly the journalist was both reporter and participant in a terrifying medical drama.
On one level, HEARTSOUNDS is an extraordinary love story---the portrait of a deeply romantic marriage in which a medical tragedy illuminates all the ties that bind. Rarely has any writer cut so deeply into the connective tissues of passion, dependency, vulnerability, rage and need that constitute a marriage.
On another level, HEARTSOUNDS is awesome medical drama. Anyone who has ever dealt with doctors or hospitals will feel the stab of recognition, for here is a piercing real-life look at the medical establishment at owrk, with its profound human failings, its bunglers, its bluffers and its heroes. Lear knew all too well what was happening to him; yet he battled, with a will that astounded his doctors, against the forces that were leading inexorably to his death. His fight becomes the collective fight against the final enemy. The reader is swept into it and carried headlong to the end, rejoicing all the way in the fierceness of the human spirit and the life-sustaining power of love.
That power is the ultimate triumph in Martha Lear's journey of self-discover. For the reader there will be many self-discoveries, for to read HEARTSOUNDS is to learn something more about love, about death---and about oneself.
