heartsounds is a book filled with love and fury, a celebration of life-- and a defiant roar against death, It probes so deeply the emotional recesses of a man and a woman, and touches so many universal nerves, that to read it is to live an experience of overwhelming intensity, Harold Lear, a prominent surgeon, was stricken at age 5 3 by a massive heart attack. Then came more heart attacks, open-heart surgery and postsurgical complications which defied diagnosis. Martha Lear was a journalist. Suddenly the doctor was a powerless patient, viewing all of medicine from the other side. What he saw astonished and enraged him. Suddenly the journalist was both reporter and participant in a terri- fying medical drama. On one level, Heartsounds is an extraor- dinary love stow--the portrait of a deeply romantic marriage in which a medical trag- edy illuminates all the ties that bind. Rarely has any writer cut so deeply into the connective tissues of passion, dependency, vulnerability, rage and need that constitute a marriage.