Dear Oliver
An unexpected friendship with Oliver Sacks
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
'A must-read for all the people who loved Oliver Sacks's books. The ending made me cry' -- Temple Grandin
"Dear Dr. Sacks . . . You asked me if I could imagine what the world would look like when viewed with two eyes. I told you that I thought I could . . . But, I was wrong."
When Susan Barry first wrote to Oliver Sacks, she never expected a response, let alone the deep friendship that blossomed over ten years of letters.
Sue, herself a neuroscientist, wrote to share an extraordinary development in her own medical history. Born with problems with her vision, Sue had been told she would never acquire the ability to see in 3D - and yet she did, a development at odds with decades of research. Within days, Oliver replied, "Your letter fills me with amazement and admiration."
Sharing an interest in visual perception and a deep love of science, Sue and Oliver began writing back and forth, delving deeper into the mysteries of sight and marvelling at the adaptive capacity of the human body.
But in a painful twist of fate, as Sue's vision improved, Oliver's declined, and his characteristic typed letters shifted to handwritten ones. Sue later recognised this to be an early sign of the cancer that ultimately ended his extraordinary life.
A funny, fascinating, and intimate glimpse of the great Oliver Sacks, Dear Oliver is also a love letter to scientific inquiry, and a testimony to the power of friendship at any time in life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Neurobiologist Barry (Fixing My Gaze) offers a nuanced and moving look at her relationship with renowned neurologist Sacks (1933–2015), whom she got to know after becoming one of his case studies. The two first met, briefly, in 1996, at a reception for Barry's astronaut husband, but it was only in 2005 that Barry wrote to Sacks to share that, with the recent intervention of an optometrist, she'd regained sight in both eyes after strabismus (crossed eyes) had led to blindness in one. Her letter elicited an enthusiastic response from Sacks, who asked for permission to write about Barry's experiences. The ensuing essay, "Stereo Sue," explained the challenges involved with a lack of stereoscopic (two-eyed) vision. Over the next decade, Barry and Sacks became close friends, exchanging more than 150 letters before Sacks's death from cancer. Barry conveys the deep warmth and compassion these late-in-life confidants offered each other—and even includes images of Sacks's type-written letters, complete with cross-outs and handwritten additions—making the book's later sections, which document how Sacks's cancer spread and became terminal, especially poignant. It adds up to a deeply stirring ode to life-altering connections that arrive when they're least expected.
