Heartsounds - by Martha Weinman Lear (Paperback)

About the Book

Originally published: New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980.

Book Synopsis

The national bestseller and undying testament of a wife's love for her husband as he embarks on the fight of his life.

On a story assignment in France for the New York Times Magazine, Martha Weinman Lear has just escaped tourist-infested Cannes for a quiet pension in the hills behind the Riviera when she gets the call from New York. Her husband has suffered a massive heart attack and is in the hospital.

Harold Lear, a fifty-three-year-old urologist and leader in the field of human sexuality research, suddenly finds himself in the helpless role of the patient. Ripping into the Lears' lives and marriage, Hal's coronary disease sends them on a journey through New York City's medical maze. With bittersweet poignancy, Lear chronicles her husband's valiant efforts to combat his sickness as more heart attacks and devastating postsurgical complications befall him.

A stunning work of medical drama and journalism, Heartsounds is above all the gripping story of a passionate, enduring love.

Review Quotes

"When it comes to medical memoir, Martha Weinman Lear literally wrote the book. . . . The story of her first husband's slow death from intractable heart disease set a bar for the genre so high that few of the thousands of similar books published since have come close to duplicating its power. . . . Anyone at all interested in the problems of modern medicine should probably keep Heartsounds on an accessible shelf and reread it every decade or so. It is a book for the ages." --The New York Times

"An absorbing, wild, funny, tender, enraging and absolutely remarkable account . . . This is an awesome and gripping book. It is about loving as much as about dying. . . . I came away from Heartsounds feeling sad and glad--and very, very shaken." --Maggie Scarf, The New York Times Book Review

"A testament to the power of human love and the will to live!" --Publishers Weekly

"Heartsounds is a book that reads like a fine novel. . . . A rare, beautifully written cry against the modern ways of death, against death itself: It is worth every degree of the pain it takes to read it." --Joanne Greenberg, Chicago Sun-Times

"Heartsounds, a deeply felt account of a brave doctor's fight for a full life after a crippling heart attack, is both a celebration of an enviably good marriage and a cry of outrage--a book filled with love and honor and roaring against the night." --Mordecai Richler, Book-of-the-Month Club News

"It hurts, illuminates, loads the circuits with rage, transmits the energy of a great love . . . Beautifully written!" --Gail Sheehy

"Exhilarating--thanks to Lear's proud honesty!" --Gore Vidal

"It is Love Story made honest and life-size!" --Ira Levin

"The most moving love story I have ever read." --Joanne Woodward

"Written from the heart . . . It has much to say about the human spirit. I can't imagine anyone reading this book without feeling the better for it." --Norman Cousins

"No praise is too high for Heartsounds. . . . An extraordinary book . . . Martha has done a remarkable job balancing her love story with Hal, her desperate, angry struggle to save him, along with tough, specific reportage on the medical profession. . . . What a sense Martha has for anecdote, for character, for time and place . . . for life." --Patricia Bosworth

"The most courageous book I have ever read . . . A brilliant, powerful love story." --Nancy Friday

"This is so lusty, so passionate and powerful a love story that it seems to stand up to death itself." --Marlo Thomas

"A searing chronicle of grace under pressure . . . Readers may learn to make that ultimate toast with which Martha Lear concludes her book: L'chaim--to life." --The San Francisco Examiner

"Engrossing, touching and very frightening . . . Martha Lear is an eloquent, powerful writer." -- Dr. William A. Nolen, The Washington Post

"Unsparing, proud . . . One weeps through the last chapter." --Los Angeles Times

"A deeply stirring book . . . Though the story is a familiar one, I have never before read it set down with such power and emotion." --John Barkham Reviews

"A riveting accoun

About the Author

Martha Weinman Lear is the author of Where Did I Leave My Glasses? as well as the bestsellers The Child Worshipers and Heartsounds, which became a Peabody Award­-winning film. She is a former articles editor and staff writer for the New York Times Magazine and has written extensively for that and many other national publications, including AARP The Magazine, the New Yorker, the New York Times Book Review, GQ, House Beautiful, Redbook, Ladies' Home Journal, Woman's Day, McCall's, Family Circle, and Reader's Digest, often on medical, cultural, and sociological subjects. She lives in New York City with her husband, screenwriter Albert Ruben.