THE STORY OF YOUR HEART

A straightforward and readable discussion of the heart, its workings, heart defeets, heart surgery, and other circulatory-system disorders such as atherosclerosis. As Limburg notes, heart trouble is usually a problem of age, but he balances this with examples of children born with heart defects and the corrections that must be made. Limburg's anatomical descriptions are full of reminders that what we are talking about is more than a science-lab model or diagrams on the page: ""A living heart is a dull, brownish red in color, like a piece of liver before it is cooked""; the pericardium, ""peeled off,"" looks like a piece of plastic wrap; and the myocardium is red ""like a piece of raw steak."" Overall, a more successful introduction than Elgin's The Heart (1968), with special interest for the medically curious.