A review by left_coast_justin
Ticker: The Quest to Create an Artificial Heart by Mimi Swartz
4.0
Until reading this book, I'd never heard of Mimi Swartz, but she's a really good researcher and writer and I look forward to finding more of her work.
I began reading this book and a second book called "Waterfront: A Walk Aroung Manhattan" on the same day. Both were written by highly-acclaimed writers who have been published in The New Yorker (as solid an imprimatur as we're likely to find.) And yet Swartz has written a great book, and Lopate did not. So let's see if I can figure out what made this book so much fun:
-People who do interesting work are fun to learn about. She focused the book primarily on the stories of three people who really broke down barriers in assisting really sick heart patients
-The story had an arc, from the very earliest days of heart surgery to the present, where thousands of LAVD devices are implanted every year and it's become almost routine. The arc also contained the entire professional lifespans of two of the protagonists
-The usual elements of drama were abundant: Ambition, defeat, the enemy (a faceless bureaucracy), the old guard and the young mavericks, etc etc etc.
The nice thing about this approach is that it took several decades to unfold, and Swartz is smart enough to trickle in a small amount of technical detail throughout the book. I could complain that, by the end of the book, I still didn't have a really clear idea of the current state of artificial hearts or heart assist devices, or their success inside patients; but she wasn't writing a textbook, but rather a tale of struggle and triumph. By end end, the accumulation of trickled-in information gives the reader a reasonable grounding in the subject without ever getting bogged down in eye-glazing detail.
This is a great example of literary nonfiction.
I began reading this book and a second book called "Waterfront: A Walk Aroung Manhattan" on the same day. Both were written by highly-acclaimed writers who have been published in The New Yorker (as solid an imprimatur as we're likely to find.) And yet Swartz has written a great book, and Lopate did not. So let's see if I can figure out what made this book so much fun:
-People who do interesting work are fun to learn about. She focused the book primarily on the stories of three people who really broke down barriers in assisting really sick heart patients
-The story had an arc, from the very earliest days of heart surgery to the present, where thousands of LAVD devices are implanted every year and it's become almost routine. The arc also contained the entire professional lifespans of two of the protagonists
-The usual elements of drama were abundant: Ambition, defeat, the enemy (a faceless bureaucracy), the old guard and the young mavericks, etc etc etc.
The nice thing about this approach is that it took several decades to unfold, and Swartz is smart enough to trickle in a small amount of technical detail throughout the book. I could complain that, by the end of the book, I still didn't have a really clear idea of the current state of artificial hearts or heart assist devices, or their success inside patients; but she wasn't writing a textbook, but rather a tale of struggle and triumph. By end end, the accumulation of trickled-in information gives the reader a reasonable grounding in the subject without ever getting bogged down in eye-glazing detail.
This is a great example of literary nonfiction.