Everything in Its Place
First Loves and Last Tales
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
From the best-selling author of Gratitude and On the Move, a final volume of essays that showcase Sacks’s broad range of interests–from his passion for ferns, swimming, and horsetails, to his final case histories exploring schizophrenia, dementia, and Alzheimer’s.
Oliver Sacks, scientist and storyteller, is beloved by readers for his neurological case histories and his fascination and familiarity with human behavior at its most unexpected and unfamiliar. Everything in Its Place is a celebration of Sacks’s myriad interests, told with his characteristic compassion and erudition, and in his luminous prose.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this lovely collection of previously unpublished essays, the late, celebrated author and neurologist Sacks (The River of Consciousness) muses on his career, his youth, the mental health field, and much more. Readers will learn of influences that molded Sacks's brilliant mind, from the cephalopod specimens at the Natural History Museum in London to the "visionary, mystical" 19th-century scientist Humphry Davy, whom Sacks dubs the "Poet of Chemistry." Of the many remarkable essays on medical conditions, "Travels with Lowell" stands out for its sensitivity and nuance, as Sacks travels the world alongside a photographer with Tourette's, interviewing others with the condition, including one man who could trace incidents of the syndrome back six generations in his family, yet was not officially diagnosed until age 38. Sacks also recalls being consulted in the case of actor/writer Spalding Gray, who became desperately, compulsively depressed after a brain injury in 2001 and died by suicide three years later. Sacks's gentle, ruminative voice is a salve when investigating difficult subject matter, but there are plenty of lighter moments as well, as in a brief discussion of a topic dear to his heart New York City's many and varied streetlamps. Piercingly insightful and delightfully strange, Sacks's final collection is a treat for the chronically curious.
