One of Brian Doyle's twin sons was born with only three chambers in his heart, and in the nine years that followed, Doyle has become absorbed by the heart, for "we are soaked in the song of the heart every hour of every year every life long." He weaves the story of Liam with that of Dr. Dave McIrvin, his son's pediatric cardiologist, and along the way side trips and segues into many stories about hearts--the doctor's mother interned in Utah during World War II, an Armenian surgeon who starts a hospital in Yerevan, a Cambodian who survived the killings fields, a priest, a best friend. He ponders grace, after raging at Liam's Maker for making a broken boy: "I have learned to shut my mouth and learn about grace: the deft grace of the doctors who edited him, the open grace of the thousand people who prayed for him in churches and temples and stupas and chapels and novenas, the grace with which he carries the body God gave him." He writes that all animals are issued the same number of beats for a lifetime: "The pulse then continues, on average, for about two billion pulses. . . . Mayflies to mastodons, beetles to bison, prophets to poets, all are issued the same number of pulses to do with what they will. Tell me, asks the great quiet American poet Mary Oliver, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" Doyle's prose is lyrical and meandering and sometimes whimsical, and always affecting.A nice addition for booksellers is Paraclete Press's explanation of who they are, which includes, "we like it best when readers buy our books from booksellers, our partners in successfully reaching as wide an audience as possible."--Marilyn Dahl