Sign up for our newsletters to receive our Best of 2024 ezine!

Book Summary and Reviews of Healing Hearts: A Memoir of a Female Heart Surgeon by Kathy Magliato M.D.

Healing Hearts: A Memoir of a Female Heart Surgeon by Kathy Magliato M.D.

Healing Hearts: A Memoir of a Female Heart Surgeon

by Kathy Magliato M.D.

  • Critics' Consensus (12):
  • Published:
  • Jan 2010, 272 pages
  • Rate this book

About this book

Book Summary

An inspiring, surprising, and deeply informative memoir of the high-stakes life of a female heart surgeon.
 
Dr. Kathy Magliato is one of fewer than a dozen female heart surgeons practicing in the world today. She is also a member of an even more exclusive group—those surgeons who perform heart transplants. Healing Hearts is the story of the making of a surgeon who also calls herself a wife and mother. Dr. Magliato takes us into her highly demanding, physically intense, male-dominated world and shows us how she masterfully works to save patients lives every day.
 
In her memoir we come to know many of those patients whose lives Dr. Magliato has touched: a baby born with a hole in her heart, a ninety-four-year-old woman with heart failure, and a thirty-five year old movie producer who saves her own life by recognizing the symptoms of a heart attack. Along the way, Dr. Magliato sheds light on the rarely recognized symptoms of heart attack and cardiovascular disease—the #1 killer of women in America—and the specific measures that can be taken to prevent it.
 
By taking us deep into her life and those of her patients, Dr. Magliato acquaints us with the day to day realities of her life and work. We see her frantically juggle a full and happy family life as the wife of a liver transplant surgeon (they each have bedside tables cluttered with pagers and cell-phones) and mother of two young boys. We also see the toll that being a female pioneer can take, as well as the rewards of such demanding work.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Reviews

Media Reviews

"Starred Review. In her amazing memoir, Magliato belies the myth of surgeons as distant, cocky, robotic—and male. Look for sobering statistics on women and heart disease, and an inspiring example of living and loving life to the fullest." - Publishers Weekly

"Fast-paced, smooth writing that never bores." - Booklist.com

"Magliato is a courageous, successful doctor with admirable goals and an impressive résumé. Bold and educative." - Kirkus Reviews

More information
Browse an excerpt
An interview with Kathy Magliato
Reading guide

This information about Healing Hearts: A Memoir of a Female Heart Surgeon was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

More Information

Kathy E. Magliato, MD, is currently the director of women’s cardiac services at Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, California, and an attending cardiothoracic surgeon at Torrance Memorial Medical Center in Torrance, California, where she is developing a women’s heart center to address the cardiac needs of female patients. She lives in Pacific Palisades with her husband and their two children.

More Author Information

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

More Recommendations

Readers Also Browsed . . .

more biography/memoir...

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket: The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern
    The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern
    by Lynda Cohen Loigman
    Lynda Cohen Loigman's delightful novel The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern opens in 1987. The titular ...
  • Book Jacket: Small Rain
    Small Rain
    by Garth Greenwell
    At the beginning of Garth Greenwell's novel Small Rain, the protagonist, an unnamed poet in his ...
  • Book Jacket: Daughters of Shandong
    Daughters of Shandong
    by Eve J. Chung
    Daughters of Shandong is the debut novel of Eve J. Chung, a human rights lawyer living in New York. ...
  • Book Jacket: The Women
    The Women
    by Kristin Hannah
    Kristin Hannah's latest historical epic, The Women, is a story of how a war shaped a generation ...

BookBrowse Book Club

Book Jacket
In Our Midst
by Nancy Jensen
In Our Midst follows a German immigrant family’s fight for freedom after their internment post–Pearl Harbor.
Who Said...

Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do ...

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Big Holiday Wordplay 2024

Enter Now

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.