"Ms. Lear [tells] an emotional story with humor and precision. . . . A consummate writer like Ms. Lear would never dream of enunciating the obvious moral, but the message is that like the body, the heart and the mind can be amazingly resilient.” —The New York Times “A remarkable testimony to the problems we face with recognition, diagnosis and treatment of heart disease in women.” —C. Noel Bairey Merz, MD, director of the Barbra Streisand Women’s Heart Center at the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute “Here is a refresher course in handling life’s meanest challenges with grace.” —Library Journal “Directly evokes her riveting, unsparing memoir Heartsounds. In the earlier work her husband, Hal, a beloved doctor, had a massive heart attack, followed by complications that led to his death at 57. The irony is not lost on Ms. Lear when, 30 years later, she has a coronary and ensuing infection and finds herself in the same hospital ward with the same attending physician. . . . Although she finds kindred spirits among many of the medical professionals, she is also afflicted with some of the same ignominy, the coldness, the cruelty that assaulted her first husband. Of course she is terrified that her outcome will be the same as her husband’s. But despite the parallels, Ms. Lear is far too clever and introspective a writer to be content with comparing and contrasting two myocardial infarctions.” —The East Hampton StarPraise for Heartsounds “Absorbing, wild, funny, tender, enraging, absolutely remarkable . . . An awesome and gripping book. It is about loving as much as about dying.” —The New York Times Book Review “If love, humor, and determination could restore a ruined heart, surely the Lears would have won.” —Cosmopolitan “Reads like a fine novel that has the additional resonance of truth.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer “[A] powerful and moving account of a man, a woman and an illness.” —The Dallas Morning News “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 account of life and love and, yes, death.” —The Washington Star
