Iron Heart : The True Story of How I Came Back from the Dead

It was a horrific car crash. On the way home from swim practice, eighteen-year old Brian Boyle's future changed in an instant when a dump truck plowed into his Camaro. He was airlifted to a shock-trauma hospital. He had lost sixty percent of his blood, his heart had moved across his chest, and his organs and pelvis were pulverized. He was placed in a medically-induced coma. When Brian finally emerged from the coma two months later, he had no memory of the accident. He could see and hear, but not move or talk. Unable to communicate to his doctors, nurses, or frantic parents, he heard words like "vegetable" and "nursing home". If he lived, doctors predicted he might not be able to walk again, and certainly not swim. Then, miraculously, Brian clawed his way back to the living. First blinking his eyelids, then squeezing a hand, then smiling, he gradually emerged from his locked-in state. The former swimmer and bodybuilder had lost one hundred pounds. "Iron Heart" is the first-person account of his ordeal and his miraculous comeback. With enormous fortitude he learned to walk, then run, and eventually, to swim. With his dream of competing in the Ironman Triathlon spurring him on, Brian defied all odds, and three-and-a-half years after his accident, crossed the finish line in Kona, Hawaii. Brian's inspiring journey from coma to Kona is brought to life in this memoir.

Brian Boyle suffered a near fatal car accident when he was eighteen. A former swimmer and bodybuilder, he had become a human skeleton but became determined to compete in the Hawaii Ironman. In October of 2007, he realized his goal and crossed the finish line in Kona. NBC television covered him during the triathlon. In 2008, Men's Health magazine named Boyle one of its twenty heroes. He's currently a student at St. Mary's College in Maryland. Bill Katovsky is editor, author, and coauthor of several books, including Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq, which won Harvard's Goldsmith Book Prize. He's finished the Hawaii Ironman twice and is founder of Triathlete Magazine. He lives in NOrthern California.