Coronary

THE YEAR OF MY REBIRTH (342 pp.)-- Jesse Stuart--McGraw-Hill ($4.75).

No man can really begin living until he has come close to dying. That is the message from Poet-Novelist Jesse Stuart to his readers. Busy Author Stuart, who wrote nearly 20 books in 20 years, including the rawboned poetry of Man with a Bull-Tongued Plow and bestselling Taps for Private Tussie, used to live at top speed. Then, two years ago, at 47, rushing from a lecture in Murray, Ky. to catch a chartered plane for another speaking date in Illinois, he was brought crashing to earth by a severe heart attack.

This book is the record of the year that followed. From a hulking, aggressive man-in-a-hurry who liked physical action and plenty of it, Stuart was reduced to an invalid without even the strength to tie his shoelaces. Carried back to the Ken tucky hill country where he was born, he became a prisoner in his house. A "No Visitors" sign in the driveway kept away bothersome humans, and Stuart turned gratefully to new friends: the three-legged 'possum who lived beneath the kitchen, the pewees nesting by the kitchen door, the baby-handed mole tunneling under the yard. His journal of recovery is alive with the awareness of a man who has found time not only to live life but to examine it, and though most of his conclusions are venerable platitudes, they are stated with all the force and convic tion of newly minted truth.

Physically, convalescent Stuart was like a child, having to learn all over again to stand alone and then to walk and, finally, to use his arms and hands and even to put food in his mouth. Mounting a short flight of steps was as exhausting as climbing the Matterhorn. Mentally, he subscribed to a new set of values in which the blades of grass and daisies in a pasture had more intrinsic worth than the expensive cattle that fed on them, and nature's annual resurrection in spring seemed proof of the presence of God and the promise of heaven. For other survivors of heart attack Stuart has some cautionary words. Much more than the heart can be affected. His vision dropped abruptly from 20-20 to the point where he was unable to read newspaper headlines without the help of glasses. And the months immediately following an attack bring with them fits of depression so deep that a man believes "he is through in his profession and in life."

In compensation, as he slowly recovers strength the patient feels reborn and cast in a different mold--more tolerant, more kindly, more reflective than before. Says Stuart: "My world had been a thousand friends in a hundred cities, ten cups of coffee and loud talk until three in the morning. Now my world was reduced to my home, my farm, my hills. I lived more closely with my wife, my daughter, my animal friends. I thought more deeply of my God." And implicit in the book is the strongly held feeling that the close brush with death was well worth the cost.

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