Swartz tells all their stories with a novelist’s deft touch for character and dramatic tension ... The philosophical off-gassing that accompanies these developments [in heart techology] is also addressed ... Ticker needs no further comparisons to The Right Stuff. But there are some similarities: Both space exploration and the development of an artificial heart are pursuits that do not yet have a final chapter. And both enjoyed periods of great renown, only to have the public begin to lose the fervor of its early interest ... Those involved in the development can’t settle into the complacency that immerses the rest of us. Which means Swartz had to build an ending that I won’t describe here because it’s too fragile and beautiful to spoil.

Dramatic and dense with fascinating medical information, Mimi Swartz's Ticker will astonish you ... This book is no highly specialized, academic/medical work à la the New England Journal of Medicine. No. This is a dramatic adventure story on the level of Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff (1979). The colorful characters here, nearly all renowned surgeons and frequently contentious rivals, are all too human, and beyond, with egos and eccentricities on glaring display.

The holy grail is a device that would make transplants altogether unnecessary. The search for that grail has been, as Mimi Swartz shows in her fascinating book, as complicated as the essential organ itself ... Ticker introduces readers to a dizzying array of hospitals, medical centers, institutes, laboratories and garage workshops where investors, inventors and innovators have been hard at work. In part because of the local focus of Ms. Swartz’s reporting and writing, the most well-developed characters are native or adopted Texans ... The wild early days of heart research had coincided with the period when NASA was trying to put a man on the moon, and Houston became the linchpin of both engineering efforts. The importance of engineers working alongside doctors and physical scientists turns out to be a leitmotif of Ms. Swartz’s book ... The debate continues, as does the quest to create hearts that could not only save lives but even be fully tailored to each patient—'a perfect fit,' as Ms. Swartz puts it.

Readers are introduced to a couple who fall in love, marry, and then the husband feels ill. They disappear from the narrative till much later, when the husband receives an experimental device but succumbs to his illness four weeks later. After many promising attempts readers will wonder if there will ever be a viable, long-term artificial heart ... For fans of nonfiction with a little suspense and drama. Not recommended for animal lovers or people looking for a more academic treatment.

It doesn’t take an acute interest in the human heart to be hooked after only a few pages of Ticker ... Some of the book’s descriptions take the characters’ heroism a bit too far; for instance, if you take Swartz’s word for it, nearly every surgeon mentioned (and there are a lot of them) is dashing, tall, blond, and usually blue-eyed. Then there’s the fact—no fault of Swartz’s but a problematic testament to the times—that the quest to build an artificial heart has been dominated for decades by white men. It’s only recently that Frazier has noticed a 'diversity [that] would have been unimaginable' in years past. Most jarring is a particular indifference on the part of the surgeons and, sometimes, Swartz herself. Surgeons are ecstatic when one in a large group of research lab calfs survives for a few hours on a newly developed device. They can’t wait for a patient to come along who is sick enough for them to legally experiment with a new implantation ... It wouldn’t have hurt for Swartz to give a sympathetic nod to the fact that theory and reality aren’t the same thing; people are bound to sometimes prioritize a person’s well-being in his or her final days over whatever latest device needs to be tested.

If you come to Ticker expecting a story about the triumph of man over nature, though, you will be disappointed. The Food and Drug Administration has yet to approve a permanent artificial heart ... her narrow focus hampers any real exploration of the ethical limits of innovation. In casting Cooley, Frazier and other artificial heart evangelists as her protagonists, she has readers follow them beating long odds and proving naysayers wrong. They emerge as heroes, if slightly flawed ones ... Other patients come and go in Ticker, and I found myself wishing to know more about how they felt about their experimental surgeries. (The widow of the man who received Cooley’s stolen artificial heart, for example, later filed a medical malpractice suit — a fact Swartz glosses over in a paragraph).

Even casually interested readers will become fascinated by Swartz’s vivid depiction of Frazier at work in the operating room. The author also analyzes the evolution of some admittedly dicey medical procedures and mechanical devices like the artificial heart, and she includes details on animal testing, a crucial necessity but no less heartbreaking for pet lovers ... The author adds breadth and perspective with sections covering the case histories of desperate patients who came to the Texas Heart Institute for medical intervention. Swartz is a witty, savvy, seasoned journalist, and she offers a welcome history of significant medical advances.

Swartz...delivers a riveting medical thriller in this story of the quest to create an artificial heart ... Readers will be on the edge of their seats waiting to see how Frazier and company overcome a variety of obstacles, such as the objections of a risk-averse FDA, the fallout from the death of the first artificial-heart recipient, and a last-minute shortage of funds. Told in an appropriately over-the-top style, this is a quintessentially Texas story: sprawling, unpredictable, and teeming with risk and opportunity.