Pump

A Natural History of the Heart

By: Bill Schutt

Narrated by: LJ Gasner

"Fascinating . . . Surprising entertainment, combining deep learning with dad jokes . . . [Schutt] is a natural teacher with an easy way with metaphor.”—The Wall Street Journal

In this lively, unexpected look at the hearts of animals—from fish to bats to humans—American Museum of Natural History zoologist Bill Schutt tells an incredible story of evolution and scientific progress.

We join Schutt on a tour from the origins of circulation, still evident in microorganisms today, to the tiny hardworking pumps of worms, to the golf-cart-size hearts of blue whales. We visit beaches where horseshoe crabs are being harvested for their blood, which has properties that can protect humans from deadly illnesses. We learn that when temperatures plummet, some frog hearts can freeze solid for weeks, resuming their beat only after a spring thaw. And we journey with Schutt through human history, too, as philosophers and scientists hypothesize, often wrongly, about what makes our ticker tick. Schutt traces humanity’s cardiac fascination from the ancient Greeks and Egyptians, who believed that the heart contains the soul, all the way up to modern-day laboratories, where scientists use animal hearts and even plants as the basis for many of today’s cutting-edge therapies.

Written with verve and authority, weaving evolutionary perspectives with cultural history, Pump shows us this mysterious organ in a completely new light.

©2021 Bill Schutt (P)2022 Algonquin Books

Critic reviews

"Fascinating . . . Surprising entertainment, combining deep learning with dad jokes . . . [Schutt] is a natural teacher with an easy way with metaphor.”—The Wall Street Journal

“[A] show-stopping exploration of cardiac biology . . . Informative, playful, and impossible to put down."—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“This brisk and engaging history of hearts of all forms and sizes packs a punch.”—Foreword Reviews, starred review

Loved this book

Bill Schutt uses memorable and entertaining analogies to explain complicated processes which I loved.

I heart this fun & informative book

This is a science book for silly and serious vertebrate readers - well-structured, knowledge-packed, and light-hearted. (But it's all about the heart, so it must also be "heavy-hearted". Or "heart-heavy"?)

This book discusses the heart as a functional biological organ across different species with illuminative examples, explanations, and comparisons. The illustration is laid out based on different themes, such as sizes, blood colors, ectotherm vs endotherm, etc. I learned a lot about the heart, other animals (such as whales, horseshoe crabs, frogs, bats, etc.), and us humans.

The tone is light and professional simultaneously. The book introduces and explains the heart and its associated organs with proper names, many of which can be unfamiliar to people outside the biology or medical fields. But the language is fun and, sometimes, half-joking. For example, there was a part the author was pretending to explain to some tiny unicellular organism readers why they got so little coverage in the book - because they had no hearts.

If you like this book and are interested in the heart in the context of human stories, check out "Heart: A History" by Sandeep Jauhar (2018). If you want something for other body parts, check out "Zero to Birth: How the Human Brain Is Built" by W.A. Harris (2022). If you are curious about the evolutionary perspective of the human organs, check out "Evolution Gone Wrong: The Curious Reasons Why Our Bodies Work (Or Don't)" by Alex Bezzerides (2021).