- Paperback: 512 pages
- Publisher: Flamingo; New Ed edition (19 Jan 2004)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0007109113
- ISBN-13: 978-0007109111
- Product Dimensions: 17.4 x 13.4 x 3.4 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 385,615 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Review
‘As intriguing and delightful as an afternoon spent rummaging through a well-stocked secondhand bookshop. An eclectic, colourful and often personal array of images of the human heart through history, for those who love cultural trivia.’ Observer
‘Wonderfully eclectic. Young’s range of reference is enormous and she is breezily at ease with it, moving nimbly from Burt Bacharach to Jeremiah in one sentence. The book is beautifully produced, there are numerous pictures, some startlingly strange, many beautiful. But although the book looks like a box of chocolates, and offers correspondingly assorted and delicious satisfactions, it is harder-centred than it appears. Young’s commentary on her material is astute and illuminating.’ Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Sunday Times
‘“The Book of the Heart” makes emotive reading. It entranced me, and caused a lifestyle revolution. While reading it, I stopped using salt or butter, gave up booze, started jogging and, for the first time ever, started making doting daily phone calls to my Significant Other, hundreds of miles away. This ambitious book could so easily be pretentious, but instead remains disarming, canny and beguiling. It is like Jack Horner's dream of a Christmas pie: wherever you put in your thumb, you will dig out the juiciest of plums.’ Independent
‘Strong and confident, exploring without sentiment or insincerity what it means to love somebody.’ The Guardian
Product Description
‘A ravishing, celebratory and funny history of the human heart. Disarming, canny and beguiling, it deserves to become a cult book.’ Independent
‘There is a universal human fascination with the heart which no other organ has inspired – not the brain, not the eyes. The heart is simply a lump of muscle, a pump, and yet it is the home of love, and courage, and religion, and soul, and almost any other human feeling you care to think of.’
This is Louisa Young’s starting point, and she goes on to produce a book that is readable, erudite, funny, intriguing, stimulating and made to be given, from the heart, as a gift. The book is in four parts (like the heart): The Physical Heart; The Religious Heart; The Heart in Art; and The Written Heart. The first part covers, amongst other things, anatomy and the history of ideas about how the heart works; weaknesses of the heart and disease; surgery and transplants; and other animals’ hearts – the heart as the seat of life. The second has the Bleeding Heart of Christ; pagan sacrifice; saints’ attributes; the heart in Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism etc – the heart as the seat of the soul. The third looks at votive art, the ‘heart/fruit thing’; sublimated visual hearts; kitsch; advertising and logos; cartoons – the heart as visual symbol. The fourth explores expressions of love in literature, from the Greeks’ musings on eros and agape via myths and legends and the invention of courtly romance to the romantic novel; also song lyrics – the heart in writing.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
When I saw this book in my local bookshop, the first thing which struck me was the presentation of it; it really is beautiful. The book is divided into four 'chambers' discussing the heart in regards to the physical heart, the heart in religion, the heart in art and the lover's heart. Each of these has a variety of black and white drawings as well as colour illustrations. There are also many poems included. This really is a treasure chest of information.
I like this book because it does not have to read just in one sitting as other bokks are typically read. Because of the different sections, this is a book you can easily dip into as and when you feel like it.
Although many readers may not find all of the sections equally as interesting, some people may find the section called 'The Anatomist's Heart' quite hard going in places, but try not to let this put you off, there is still lots of interesting bits of information to be ahd from there.
I definitely enjoyed the other three sections (or chambers) of the book. Young discusses ideas such as the heart as a book, the heart as a magic object and the heart as a musical instrument. There is definitely something in here for everyone. If you do enjoy this book, I would also suggest you read "Heart: A Personal Journey through its Myths and Meanings" by Gail Godwin.
2 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Wonderful chapters of everything one feels with the heart. Both profound and enriching. Essential reading for poets and artists.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
1 review
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Readers: Take Heart!
2 Feb 2003
Format:Hardcover
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.
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