I have been a fan of Oliver Sacks and his writing for decades. When that first beautiful NYT article came out in early 2015 and revealed he was dying from cancer, I essentially hid my head in the sand and refused to read anything else from him for a long time. He was warm and kind and insightful and passionate and I just wasn’t ready to say goodbye. The day of Anthony Bourdain’s death, I walked into my library and On the Move was sitting […]
I’ll read a Sacks book about the psychology of marshmallows.
I ran into a college professor at a bar a few years after graduation (and a few beers after sobriety) who made reference to something I said having been brilliant. I demurred “I bet you say that to all the girls,” but she insisted “no, no, you had a reputation for being brilliant. Reckless, but brilliant.” I’ve never been prouder of a compliment, precisely because I know it wasn’t entirely intended as such. I want that line on my tombstone. I bring it up because […]
“animals get diseases, but only man falls radically into sickness”
Oliver Sacks, probably best known for his work that would inspire the movie Awakenings,has devoted his life to neurology and those whose brains revolt against them. In The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat Sacks shares some of his more memorable cases. “Neurology’s favourite word is ‘deficit’, denoting an impairment or incapacity of neurological function: loss of speech, loss of language, loss of memory, loss of vision, loss of dexterity, loss of identity and myriad other lacks and losses of specific functions (or faculties).” The title […]
The Story of a Life Well Lived
A few months ago, I was on a Radiolab binge at work when one of my favorite guests showed up to be interviewed. Neuroscientist Oliver Sacks, author of scientific classics like The Man Who Mistook his Wife as a Hat was a Radiolab staple. His enthusiasm for science and discovery shined through in his interviews, whether he was talking about his love for the Periodic Table of Elements or the strange neurological cases he’d come across in his career. But from the start, this interview […]