Mimi Swartz
Executive Editor Texas Monthly 

and 
Author of Power Failure and

Ticker: The Quest to Create an Artificial Heart

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"Swartz (coauthor of Power Failure), a Texas Monthly executive editor, delivers a riveting medical thriller in this story of the quest to create an artificial heart. The starring role belongs to a quirky and brilliant workaholic Houston heart surgeon in cowboy boots, Bud Frazier. The book begins and ends with the spotlight on him; along the way, the author takes readers on a rollicking ride with similarly fascinating characters. They include single-minded Australian inventor Daniel Timms and driven surgeon Michael DeBakey, who helped make Baylor College of Medicine into a world-class institution while alienating many colleagues along the way. A few of these people are described in terms more reminiscent of a romance novel than a nonfiction account, including surgeon (and DeBakey rival), Denton Cooley, who “was so handsome... he could make the wives of patients momentarily forget their husbands’ dire circumstances.” Readers will be on the edge of their seats waiting to see how Frazier and company overcome a variety of obstacles, such as the objections of a risk-averse FDA, the fallout from the death of the first artificial-heart recipient, and a last-minute shortage of funds. Told in an appropriately over-the-top style, this is a quintessentially Texas story: sprawling, unpredictable, and teeming with risk and opportunity." (Publishers Weekly)

Mimi Swartz

Mimi Swartz, the author, with Sherron Watkins, of Power Failure, The Inside Story of the Collapse of Enron, is an executive editor of Texas Monthly. Previously, she was a staff writer at Talk, from April 1999 to April 2001, and a staff writer at the New Yorker from 1997 to 2001. Prior to joining the New Yorker, she worked at Texas Monthly for thirteen years. In 1996 Swartz was a finalist for two National Magazine Awards and won in the public interest category for “Not What the Doctor Ordered.” She was also a National Magazine Award finalist for her November 2005 issue story on tort reform, titled “Hurt' Injured' Need a Lawyer' Too Bad!” and won the 2006 John Bartlow Martin Award for Public Interest, Magazine Journalism, for the same story. In 2013 she won her second National Magazine Award (again in the category of public interest), for “Mothers, Sisters, Daughters, Wives,” a compelling look at the state of women's health care in Texas.

Over the years, Swartz’s work has appeared in Vanity Fair, Esquire, Slate, National Geographic, and the New York Times’ op-ed page and Sunday magazine. It has also been collected in Best American Political Writing 2006 and Best American Sportswriting 2007. She has been a member of the Texas Institute of Letters since 1994.