Synopses & Reviews
Gonzalez-Crussi is a master stylist, an erudite and witty recontour, a magician with words, ""an author without peer in our time.""
—Booklist Carrying the Heart is one of those remarkable books that informs and enlightens and entertains on almost every page. In this book, Dr. Gonzalez-Crussi explores our inner organ systems: The Digestive System, Respiratory System, Reproductive System, and the Cardiovascular System. As with all of his books, this one roams widely and draws abundantly from episodes of the history of medicine, examples from literature, philosophic reflections, humor and biomedical concepts. It aims to amuse and instruct, to enhance our understanding of our internal anatomical organs and systems, and how our understanding of these systems have evolved over history. This is particulary relevant today, when organ transplants and surgical ""remodeling"" of the body threaten to reduce human nature to a mere mechanism.
The book, and its approach, is completely unique, as is Dr. Gonzalez-Crussi's inimitable style.
Review
“ González-Crussi is a master stylist, an erudite and witty raconteur, a magician with words, an author without peer in our time.”
Booklist
Review
“…a sharp departure from medicine as a cold world of clinical facts and figures. Rather, [Gonzáles-Crussi] asks us to return to a view of the body not as a machine but as a wondrous work of creation, where both the corporeal and the spiritual coexist.”
—Jerome E. Groopman, The New York Review of Books“...I learned amazing things. By helping to place our current understandings of medical knowledge in a thoughtful perspective, Carrying the Heart is an important addition to the medical canon.” —The Lancet
“Carrying the Heart: Exploring the Worlds Within Us offers a pastiche of anecdotes and quotations that illustrate how our knowledge of the body has grown — and how wildly off-base even the most educated of guessers have sometimes been.” —Chronicle of Higher Education
“González-Crussi is a master stylist, an erudite and witty raconteur, a magician with words, an author without peer in our time.” —Booklist
“Eloquent pathologists Gonzales-Crussi delivers another literature-infused treatise…[his] attention to language…makes the book so enjoyable - rarely are academics so stirring in their writing. Stimulating, artful medical history.” —Kirkus Reviews
“[Gonzales-Crussi's]captivating and quirky outlook on human anatomy and physiology will entertain a wide variety of readers.” —Library Journal
“…rich…a remarkable raconteur, with a seemingly endless supply of engrossing anecdotes.” —American Scholar
“González-Crussi, a professor emeritus of pathology at Northwestern University Medical School, has a special talent for finding memorable cases to illustrate his medical histories. ""Carrying the Heart"" teems with them.” —Richmond Times-Dispatch
About the Author
F. Gonzalez-Crussi is currently Professor Emeritus of Pathology at Northwestern University Medical School. He is the author, most recently, of On Seeing: Things Seen, Unseen, and Obscene. His other books include Notes of an Anatomist, The Five Senses (a Los Angeles Times Book Prize nominee), Suspended Animation (a New York Times Notable Book), The Day of the Dead, and On Being Born and Other Difficulties. He has been described by Oliver Sacks as reminding one of ""nothing so much as Sir Thomas Browne, oddly admixed with a medical Borges.""