Letters
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
A New Yorker Best Book of 2024
The letters of one of the greatest observers of the human species, revealing his passion for life and work, friendship and art, medicine and society, and the richness of his relationships with friends, family, and fellow intellectuals over the decades, collected here for the first time.
“Here is the unedited Oliver Sacks—struggling, passionate, a furiously intelligent misfit. And also endless interesting. He was a man like no other.” —Atul Gawande, author of Being Mortal
Dr. Oliver Sacks—who describes himself in these pages as a “philosophical physician” and a “neuropathological Talmudist”—wrote letters throughout his life: to his parents and his beloved Auntie Len, to friends and colleagues from London, Oxford, California, and around the world. The letters begin with his arrival in America as a young man, eager to establish himself away from the confines of postwar England, and carry us through his bumpy early career in medicine and the discovery of his writer’s voice; his weight-lifting, motorcycle-riding years and his explosive seasons of discovery with the patients who populate his book Awakenings; his growing interest in matters of sight and the musical brain; his many friendships and exchanges with writers, artists, and scientists (to say nothing of astronauts, botanists, and mathematicians), and his deep gratitude for all these relationships at the end of his life.
Sensitively introduced and edited by Kate Edgar, Sacks’s longtime editor, the letters deliver a portrait of Sacks as he wrestles with the workings of the brain and mind. We see, through his eyes, the beginnings of modern neuroscience, following the thought processes of one of the great intellectuals of our time, whose words, as evidenced in these pages, were unfailingly shaped with generosity and wonder toward other people.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Edgar—the longtime assistant, editor, and researcher for Sacks (1933–2015)—provides an intimate window into the neurologist's personal and professional lives in this expansive collection of his correspondence. Sacks's trademark lyricism is evident throughout. For instance, a 1960 message he wrote to his family describes the dour mood in British Columbia during a drought: "The sky is low and purple, even at midday, from the smoke of innumerable fires, and the air has a terrible stultifying heat and stillness." Other entries offer insight into Sacks's distinctive approach to medical practice, which he calls "a sort of love-affair" in a 1973 letter to poet Thom Gunn ("I cannot understand anything, I cannot approach it intellectually, except as a relation, in a sort of devotion or intimacy"). Numerous celebrity scientists number among the correspondents. For example, Sacks discusses face blindness with Jane Goodall and the " ‘evolution' of illness" with biologist Stephen Jay Gould. Letters to more obscure figures can be just as amusing (a groveling 1963 message implores the L.A. DMV not to suspend his license, despite his numerous traffic violations), and frequently more revealing (a series of 1965 exchanges traces the doomed love affair between Sacks and a Berlin-based Hungarian theater director). What emerges is a pointillistic portrait of an incredible intellect with all-too-human frailties and an insatiable curiosity about the human condition. This is an essential resource for understanding Sacks.
