THE WET ENGINE: Exploring the Mad Wild Miracle of the Heart

Nine years ago the author's wife gave birth to twin boys. One was entirely normal, but the other was missing a chamber in his heart. At five months and again at 18 months, Liam had open-heart surgery. Someday he will need a heart transplant, but for now he "runs around like an insane dorky gawky goofy heron and rides his bike and shoots hoop, and skateboards and swings and punches out his brother and snarls at his sister and refuses to make his bed...." This book is about Liam, and it is also about his surgeon, his family and dozens of others with heart-related stories. It is about heart as a physical organ—how it is supposed to work, how surgeons try to fix it when it doesn't—and about heart as a metaphor for "the distilled essence of character and spirit." Most of all, it is about love, which has "many forms and levels and shapes and flavors and speeds and depths and topographies and landscapes and colors and musics." Doyle, the author of four other books of essays, sometimes spins out of control with sprawling stream-of-consciousness sentences, and he says "waaaay" waaaay too often. Still, it is hard to put down this wide-ranging meditation on the fragile mysteries of human life. (May)