Heart

A History

By: Sandeep Jauhar

Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor

For centuries, the human heart seemed beyond our understanding: an inscrutable shuddering mass that was somehow the driver of emotion and the seat of the soul. As cardiologist and best-selling author Sandeep Jauhar tells in The Heart, it was only recently that we demolished age-old taboos and devised the transformative procedures that changed the way we live.

Deftly alternating between historical episodes and his own work, Jauhar tells the colorful and little known story of the doctors who risked their careers and the patients who risked their lives to know and heal our most vital organ, braiding those tales of discovery, hubris, and sorrow with moving accounts of the patients he's treated over the years. He also confronts the limits of medical technology, boldly arguing that future progress will depend more on how we choose to live than on the devices we invent. Affecting and engaging, The Heart takes the full measure of the only organ that can move itself.

©2018 Sandeep Jauhar (P)2018 Dreamscape Media, LLC

Heart, literally and figuratively

I loved the author’s approach of teaching about cardiac medicine and also teaching about how emotions affect our health.

HEART RENDERING

"Heart" is a history of cardiovascular medicine, personalized by Sandeep Jauhar, a cardiovascular physician. Jauhar's history of cardiovascular medicine is not for squeamish listeners. It is a personalized account of advances in cardiovascular medicine by a physician whose personal life is interwoven with the ravishes of heart disease. Jauhar addresses the history of heart ailments, his family, his patients, and physician/inventors who advanced the treatment of heart disease.

Jauhar ends his book with the loss of his mother who may have died from a heart attack. He suggests there are other conditions that may have led to her death, but his point seems to be--live as healthy a life as you can because death is a part of every life, and fulfillment is in one's health.

It’s good

If you could listen to your doctor talk to you for 8 hours, this is for you.

It's Okay

Although this book has a lot of interesting stories and anecdotes about early heart surgeries, there are not enough of these for me to rate this book higher. The medical information about heart diseases and ailments were also interesting, although many went on too long and others were lacking in information.

For me--and I realize that this is on me, not the author--was the information about experiments done on animals. I honestly cannot stand to hear about/read about animals being tortured. Unfortunately, this book has a number of these anecdotes and that has colored my review. Again, I realize this is on me, but I know others are also unable to take in these stories.

I did learn some interesting things about hearts.

To sum up, listening to this book felt like homework at times, rather than a relaxing read.

The performance was fine.

Great book — need better narration

An outstanding book. I wish the narrator had taken the time to get the pronunciation of ethnic locations, names, etc correct.