The Laughing Heart—Revised

About the Book

This is a story of epic ambition—literally. It is one of an ambiguous and contestable heroism, of guilt, of stigma, of resilience, of mental illness, and of baseball. There’s music and murder, sanity, sainthood, and sickness. There is love within and across generations, and there is loss and grief. There’s hatred, crime, and revenge. There is baseball, the violin, philosophy, natural and hard-earned talents, mentored and mentor. Not enough yet? Here is a story of Kid Dee, of his unusual mother, and of religion, pro (his) and con (hers)—not to speak of a memorable father and friendships. Kid talks on and on, and for some, he gets tedious. It’s all made-up. Strange things happen.

About the Author

Robert Arnold Johnson (www.rajohnsonmd.org) is a physician whose career spanned two epochs of specialty over nearly a half century: cardiology and internal medicine 1969-2001; psychiatry 2004-2018. He is the author of more than forty medically related publications, including co-editing The Practice of Cardiology, a popular textbook of the 1980s. His book of short poems, the Inconclusive Rule was published by Xlibris in March 2018 (www.robertarnoldjohnson.com). A philosophical work co-authored with Thomas Alderson Davis on the nature of identity and its implication for medical practice, Story by Story: Who I Am, What I Suffer, will be released (Cambridge Scholars Publishers) during 2019. He is married, now thirty years, to the violinist and author Susan Eileen Pickett.