A portion from Adele’s and my book has gone up at http://www.firstofthemonth.org/i-will-keep-you-alive-excerpt-from-the-levins-cardiovascular-romance/
It begins…
Bob and Adele Levin’s I Will Keep You Alive: A Cardiovascular Romance is this husband and wife’s joint account of Bob’s heart attacks and recoveries. The Levins’ write-ups of their own emotional states, as well as their angles on vagaries of our country’s healthcare system, make their book a national resource – a map of the future for countless Americans fated to cope with hearts gone wrong. I Will Keep You Alive comes with an epigraph from Flannery O’Connor – “In a sense, sickness is a place more instructive than a long trip to Europe.” Its lessons from the land of the very sick reminded me of another instructive book: The Immoralist. Yet the Levins’ takeaways are sweeter and more sociable than Gide’s. Not that the Levins are pious types. (They are alive to dark humor in the horrors of their fearsome years.) It’s true, though, their testament hits hopeful notes that seem pretty far gone from the dailiness of hardcore modernists. Cue Ram Dass who’s praised I Will Keep You Alive as “an inspiring story of a journey through illness toward love, compassion and being.” The excerpt that follows starts with an upside as Adele Levin muses on her husband’s changes. Her entries to I Will Keep You Alive are italicized; Bob Levin’s are in plain text.