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by Christiaan Barnard and Curtis Bill Pepper, 402 pp, $7.95, New York: Macmillan Co., 1970.

Charles G. Roland, MD, Reviewer
Mayo Foundation Rochester, Minn

JAMA. 1970;213(12):2084.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

So-called autobiographies frequently are not that at all, but have a ghost-writer who usually remains anonymous. This book strays from that pattern, and in a commendably honest gesture Mr. Pepper is credited as an author.

Whether the entire book is as honest as its title page, only Christiaan Barnard knows. The important parts of an autobiography are not the various incidents of public record—who said what, who published what, who did what first—which anyone can determine; rather, the autobiography must illuminate its subject's motivations, not how he reacted to an event, but why.

One Life explains many of the "whys" of Barnard. Unfortunately, the account ends with the death of Louis Washkansky, so that we do not learn Barnard's reactions to being suddenly famous and infamous. Yet his divorce, which occurred later than the book's scope, is anticipated tastefully and with considerable literary skill.

One appealing feature of One Life . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

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