A Man After His Own Heart

Charles Siebert

Somewhere on this earth tonight, somewhere, I believe, not very far from me, there is a person whose heart I’ve touched. A person whose heart I’ve held in my hand …

So begins A Man After His Own Heart, an extraordinary narrative by acclaimed author, essayist, and poet Charles Siebert on that most elusive of topicsthe human heart. On a rainy December night in the early winter of 1998, Siebert was given the rare opportunity to accompany a team of surgeons both in the harvesting of a human heart from the body of a young woman who’d recently died of a brain aneurysm, and in the subsequent delivery and implantation of that heart into the hollowed-out chest of a waiting recipient.

Beginning with his harrowing week-long wait for the harvest call to come and culminating with the moment in which one of the implant surgeons suddenly, inexplicably, places the author’s hand on the wildly beating reanimated heart, Siebert manages to weave a seamless series of ruminations and reflections about his own obsession with the heart and his often estranged father’s fatal heart disease; about history’s continuing obsession with this most central and vital organ; and about modern science’s latest startling discoveries concerning both the heart’s biological origins and its long-intuited role in the play of our emotions. The resulting mix is nothing less than a radically new, definitive biography of life’s most pondered and poeticised protagonist. This story is a journey into the heart of our being, and the previously unexplored ways in which the matter of modern science and timeless metaphor meet.