“Every second counts …”. If the title makes you think of the biography of an athlete then you won’t be too far off the mark. The author Donald McRae has twice won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award. His other books are about boxing, Jesse Owens and the sex industry. So it is written in that style. It could be about the race between Roger Bannister, John Landy and Wes Santee to be the first to break the Four Minute Mile. Instead it is about “the race to transplant the first human heart”. The main competitors are Adrian Kantrowicz in New York, Norman Shumway at Stanford, Richard Lower in Virginia and Christiaan Barnard at Groote Schuur in South Africa.

It takes us back …