On the Move
A Life
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4.4 • 149 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A “wonderful memoir” (Los Angeles Times) about a brilliantly unconventional physician and writer, a man who has illuminated the many ways that the brain makes us human. • “Intimate.... Brim[s] with life and affection.” —The New York Times
When Oliver Sacks was twelve years old, a perceptive schoolmaster wrote: “Sacks will go far, if he does not go too far.” It is now abundantly clear that Sacks has never stopped going. With unbridled honesty and humor, Sacks writes about the passions that have driven his life—from motorcycles and weight lifting to neurology and poetry. He writes about his love affairs, both romantic and intellectual; his guilt over leaving his family to come to America; his bond with his schizophrenic brother; and the writers and scientists—W. H. Auden, Gerald M. Edelman, Francis Crick—who have influenced his work.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The celebrated bard of the brain's quirks reveals a flamboyant secret life and a multitude of intellectual passions in this rangy, introspective autobiography. Picking up from his boyhood memoir, Uncle Tungsten, neurologist Sacks (The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat) explores the complexities of his adult experience, including his homosexuality, which yielded a number of intense but transitory affairs; obsessions with weight lifting and motorcycles (complete with leather wardrobe); and a ravaging addiction to amphetamines. While Sacks's physical and emotional lives are more prominent here than in past writings, he's still fascinated with the mind and presents absorbing disquisitions on Tourette's syndrome, autism, visual processing, and the Darwinian struggle of mental processes. His loosely structured narrative takes innumerable detours, rambling among memoiristic snippets (including a pungent story about a journey through America's truck stop culture), sketches of writers and celebrities (W.H. Auden, Robin Williams, Francis Crick), moving portraits of close friends and family, and, as always, engrossing case studies of neurology patients. Sacks's writing is lucid, earnest, and straightforward, yet always raptly attuned to subtleties of character and feeling in himself and others; the result, closely following his announcement that he has terminal cancer, is a fitting retrospective of his lifelong project of making science a deeply humanistic pursuit. Photos.
Customer Reviews
A Beautiful Life
The life detailed in this memoir is an example of brilliance and beauty in every conceivable way. I have long enjoyed Oliver Sacks’ writing which is capable of transplanting you firmly into the experience of one of his patients. I had no idea that his own life would prove to be so transfixing and exemplary of how life should be lived. A life that as a fan of his, I am ashamed to have known nothing about until picking this book up.
Sacks still takes great pains to acknowledge the privilege that afforded him such a broadness of opportunity. All the while leaving room for his natural curiosity and courage to shine through in the nuanced moments of a vast life. A forward looking perspective that contrasts the often backwards social attitudes of the medical field at his time. Perhaps even today that empathetic lens is left wanting in most professionals.
What stood out most for me was his reflectiveness; a trait that many people lack. It’s this 360 perspective that he maintains that distinguishes his writing a point which he acknowledges he was coached on by many friends. His method has become avoid simply being technical and to find the lyrical grace and fluidity that few can surpass or imitate.