The Book of the Heart

Rating:
Summary: Readers: Take Heart!
Review: When Louisa Young's father was recovering from heart bypass surgery, she found herself thinking about hearts. Her thoughts have been productive, as she has delved into science, art, and history to tell about anatomical hearts, pumping hearts, religious, sacrificial, musical, metaphorical, preserved, consumed, ill, and legendary hearts. She tells us she could happily have extended _The Book of the Heart_ (Doubleday) into twelve volumes, and while reading through such a mass would be daunting, this distillation of her research is captivating. There is little about human hearts that she has not covered.

Hearts are divided into four chambers, and her book is divided into four sections called chambers. The first is about the anatomical and physiological heart, and how we came to understand scientifically what it was doing, and how to repair it when it went wrong. There is a fascinating summary of how the Egyptians, Greeks, and so on, figured the working of the heart, and how Aristotle got it all wrong and confused everyone for centuries. William Harvey published in 1628 the authoritative and scientific demonstration that the single two-sided heart was merely a pump to serve distribution of a single pool of blood to the lungs and to the body. Some saints were given new hearts by Jesus, whose sacred heart became a symbol in itself. The Aztec religion (and other tribal beliefs) promoted eating of the heart, and a thirteenth century mold exists that made communion wafers (which became flesh rather than merely representing it) in the shape of a heart. The third chamber is for the heart in art. Young defends kitsch hearts in religious and other arts, but tells us that she is writing in her room full of glitter hearts, tin hearts, Venetian glass hearts, and more, so this might be self-serving. The final chamber is for the lover's heart. There is actually not much hearty about St. Valentine, but by chance his feast day coincided with the Roman Lupercalia festival, a sort of marriage lottery. There is much lovely heart poetry here.

This is a wonderful book of heart miscellany, full of fun. Young says that pursuing her subject in the library has lead to countless spells of laughing out loud. It is easy to believe this. She has a sharp and ironic way of writing, and has made unforced connections between cultures and between centuries because the heart is universally central to all. She modestly compares her curious book to a vegetable soup - "if you find one bit not to your taste, move on, feel free - all the flavors connect up." But the whole can be taken easily, except, perhaps, by the faint of heart, and the hard hearted.

Rating:
Summary: Readers: Take Heart!
Review: When Louisa Young's father was recovering from heart bypass surgery, she found herself thinking about hearts. Her thoughts have been productive, as she has delved into science, art, and history to tell about anatomical hearts, pumping hearts, religious, sacrificial, musical, metaphorical, preserved, consumed, ill, and legendary hearts. She tells us she could happily have extended _The Book of the Heart_ (Doubleday) into twelve volumes, and while reading through such a mass would be daunting, this distillation of her research is captivating. There is little about human hearts that she has not covered.

Hearts are divided into four chambers, and her book is divided into four sections called chambers. The first is about the anatomical and physiological heart, and how we came to understand scientifically what it was doing, and how to repair it when it went wrong. There is a fascinating summary of how the Egyptians, Greeks, and so on, figured the working of the heart, and how Aristotle got it all wrong and confused everyone for centuries. William Harvey published in 1628 the authoritative and scientific demonstration that the single two-sided heart was merely a pump to serve distribution of a single pool of blood to the lungs and to the body. Some saints were given new hearts by Jesus, whose sacred heart became a symbol in itself. The Aztec religion (and other tribal beliefs) promoted eating of the heart, and a thirteenth century mold exists that made communion wafers (which became flesh rather than merely representing it) in the shape of a heart. The third chamber is for the heart in art. Young defends kitsch hearts in religious and other arts, but tells us that she is writing in her room full of glitter hearts, tin hearts, Venetian glass hearts, and more, so this might be self-serving. The final chamber is for the lover's heart. There is actually not much hearty about St. Valentine, but by chance his feast day coincided with the Roman Lupercalia festival, a sort of marriage lottery. There is much lovely heart poetry here.

This is a wonderful book of heart miscellany, full of fun. Young says that pursuing her subject in the library has lead to countless spells of laughing out loud. It is easy to believe this. She has a sharp and ironic way of writing, and has made unforced connections between cultures and between centuries because the heart is universally central to all. She modestly compares her curious book to a vegetable soup - "if you find one bit not to your taste, move on, feel free - all the flavors connect up." But the whole can be taken easily, except, perhaps, by the faint of heart, and the hard hearted.