And How Are You, Dr. Sacks?

And How Are You, Dr. Sacks? PDF Author: Lawrence Weschler
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 0374714940
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 291

Get Book Here

Book Description
“A wonderful portrayal of a brilliant, eccentric man,” this biographical memoir by an award-winning author is the untold story of Dr. Oliver Sacks (People). Lawrence Weschler began spending time with Oliver Sacks in the early 1980s, when he was profiling the neurologist for The New Yorker. Almost a decade earlier, Dr. Sacks had published Awakenings—the account of his long-dormant patients’ miraculous return to life. Over the ensuing four years, the two men worked closely together until, for personal reasons, Sacks asked Weschler to abandon the profile. The two remained close friends over the next thirty years and then, just as Sacks was dying, he urged Weschler to take up the project once again. This book is the result of that entreaty. Weschler sets Sacks’s brilliant personality in vivid relief. We see Sacks rowing and ranting and caring deeply; composing the essays that would form The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and waging intellectual war against a medical and scientific establishment that failed to address his greatest concern: the spontaneous specificity of the individual human soul. Here is the definitive portrait of Sacks, whose entire practice revolved around the single fundamental question he asked each of his patients: How are you? Which is to say, How do you be? A question which Weschler, with this book, turns back on the good doctor himself. “Engrossing. . . . This is Sacks at full blast: on endless ward rounds, observing his post-encephalitic patients . . . exulting over horseshoe crabs and chunks of Iceland spar.” —Barbara Kiser, Nature “Thoroughly engaging and enchanting.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review “Does a particularly good job intertwining Sacks’s searching empathy with his sheer strangeness.” —New York Times Book Review

And How Are You, Dr. Sacks?

And How Are You, Dr. Sacks? PDF Author: Lawrence Weschler
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 0374714940
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 291

Get Book Here

Book Description
“A wonderful portrayal of a brilliant, eccentric man,” this biographical memoir by an award-winning author is the untold story of Dr. Oliver Sacks (People). Lawrence Weschler began spending time with Oliver Sacks in the early 1980s, when he was profiling the neurologist for The New Yorker. Almost a decade earlier, Dr. Sacks had published Awakenings—the account of his long-dormant patients’ miraculous return to life. Over the ensuing four years, the two men worked closely together until, for personal reasons, Sacks asked Weschler to abandon the profile. The two remained close friends over the next thirty years and then, just as Sacks was dying, he urged Weschler to take up the project once again. This book is the result of that entreaty. Weschler sets Sacks’s brilliant personality in vivid relief. We see Sacks rowing and ranting and caring deeply; composing the essays that would form The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and waging intellectual war against a medical and scientific establishment that failed to address his greatest concern: the spontaneous specificity of the individual human soul. Here is the definitive portrait of Sacks, whose entire practice revolved around the single fundamental question he asked each of his patients: How are you? Which is to say, How do you be? A question which Weschler, with this book, turns back on the good doctor himself. “Engrossing. . . . This is Sacks at full blast: on endless ward rounds, observing his post-encephalitic patients . . . exulting over horseshoe crabs and chunks of Iceland spar.” —Barbara Kiser, Nature “Thoroughly engaging and enchanting.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review “Does a particularly good job intertwining Sacks’s searching empathy with his sheer strangeness.” —New York Times Book Review

The Mind's Eye

The Mind's Eye PDF Author: Oliver Sacks
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307594556
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 261

Get Book Here

Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From “the poet laureate of medicine" (The New York Times) and the author of the classic The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat comes a fascinating exploration of the remarkable, unpredictable ways that our brains cope with the loss of sight by finding rich new forms of perception. “Elaborate and gorgeously detailed.... Again and again, Sacks invites readers to imagine their way into minds unlike their own, encouraging a radical form of empathy.” —Los Angeles Times With compassion and insight, Dr. Oliver Sacks again illuminates the mysteries of the brain by introducing us to some remarkable characters, including Pat, who remains a vivacious communicator despite the stroke that deprives her of speech, and Howard, a novelist who loses the ability to read. Sacks investigates those who can see perfectly well but are unable to recognize faces, even those of their own children. He describes totally blind people who navigate by touch and smell; and others who, ironically, become hyper-visual. Finally, he recounts his own battle with an eye tumor and the strange visual symptoms it caused. As he has done in classics like The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat and Awakenings, Dr. Sacks shows us that medicine is both an art and a science, and that our ability to imagine what it is to see with another person's mind is what makes us truly human.

On the Move

On the Move PDF Author: Oliver Sacks
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0385352557
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 384

Get Book Here

Book 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.

Everything in Its Place

Everything in Its Place PDF Author: Oliver Sacks
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0451492900
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Get Book Here

Book Description
From the legendary author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: a volume of essays on everything from primordial life and the mysteries of the brain to the ancient ginkgo and the power of the written word. "Magical . . . [Everything in Its Place] showcases the neurologist's infinitely curious mind."—People Magazine In this volume, Oliver Sacks examines the many passions that defined his life--both as a doctor engaged with the central questions of human existence and as a polymath conversant in all the sciences. Everything in Its Place brings together writings on a rich variety of topics. Why do humans need gardens? How, and when, does a physician tell his patient she has Alzheimer's? What is social media doing to our brains? In several of the compassionate case histories included here, we see Sacks consider the enigmas of depression, psychosis, and schizophrenia for the first time. In others, he returns to conditions that have long fascinated him: Tourette's syndrome, aging, dementia, and hallucinations. In counterpoint to these elegant investigations of what makes us human, this volume also includes pieces that celebrate Sacks's love of the natural world--and his final meditations on life in the twenty-first century.

Seeing Voices

Seeing Voices PDF Author: Oliver Sacks
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307365751
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 247

Get Book Here

Book Description
Like The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, this is a fascinating voyage into a strange and wonderful land, a provocative meditation on communication, biology, adaptation, and culture. In Seeing Voices, Oliver Sacks turns his attention to the subject of deafness, and the result is a deeply felt portrait of a minority struggling for recognition and respect — a minority with its own rich, sometimes astonishing, culture and unique visual language, an extraordinary mode of communication that tells us much about the basis of language in hearing people as well. Seeing Voices is, as Studs Terkel has written, "an exquisite, as well as revelatory, work."

Awakenings

Awakenings PDF Author: Oliver Sacks
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307834093
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 506

Get Book Here

Book Description
The classic account of survivors of the sleeping-sickness during the great epidemic just after World War I—and their return to the world after decades of “sleep.” • “One of the most beautifully composed and moving works of our time" (The Washington Post) from the distinguished neurologist and the national bestselling author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Awakenings—which inspired the major motion picture starring Robert DeNiro and Robin Williams—is the remarkable story of a group of patients who contracted sleeping-sickness during the great epidemic just after World War I. Frozen for decades in a trance-like state, these men and women were given up as hopeless until 1969, when Dr. Oliver Sacks gave them the then-new drug L-DOPA, which had an astonishing, explosive, "awakening" effect. Dr. Sacks recounts the moving case histories of his patients, their lives, and the extraordinary transformations which went with their reintroduction to a changed world.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales

The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales PDF Author: Oliver Sacks
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0684853949
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Get Book Here

Book Description
Explores neurological disorders and their effects upon the minds and lives of those affected with an entertaining voice.

Insomniac City

Insomniac City PDF Author: Bill Hayes
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1620404958
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Get Book Here

Book Description
Amazon's Best Biographies and Memoirs of the Year List A moving celebration of what Bill Hayes calls "the evanescent, the eavesdropped, the unexpected" of life in New York City, and an intimate glimpse of his relationship with the late Oliver Sacks. "A beautifully written once-in-a-lifetime book, about love, about life, soul, and the wonderful loving genius Oliver Sacks, and New York, and laughter and all of creation."--Anne Lamott Bill Hayes came to New York City in 2009 with a one-way ticket and only the vaguest idea of how he would get by. But, at forty-eight years old, having spent decades in San Francisco, he craved change. Grieving over the death of his partner, he quickly discovered the profound consolations of the city's incessant rhythms, the sight of the Empire State Building against the night sky, and New Yorkers themselves, kindred souls that Hayes, a lifelong insomniac, encountered on late-night strolls with his camera. And he unexpectedly fell in love again, with his friend and neighbor, the writer and neurologist Oliver Sacks, whose exuberance--"I don't so much fear death as I do wasting life," he tells Hayes early on--is captured in funny and touching vignettes throughout. What emerges is a portrait of Sacks at his most personal and endearing, from falling in love for the first time at age seventy-five to facing illness and death (Sacks died of cancer in August 2015). Insomniac City is both a meditation on grief and a celebration of life. Filled with Hayes's distinctive street photos of everyday New Yorkers, the book is a love song to the city and to all who have felt the particular magic and solace it offers.

The River of Consciousness

The River of Consciousness PDF Author: Oliver Sacks
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0385352573
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 153

Get Book Here

Book Description
From the bestselling author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, a collection of essays that displays Oliver Sacks's passionate engagement with the most compelling ideas of human endeavor: evolution, creativity, memory, time, consciousness, and experience. "Curious, avid and thrillingly fluent." —The New York Times Book Review In the pieces that comprise The River of Consciousness, Dr. Sacks takes on evolution, botany, chemistry, medicine, neuroscience, and the arts, and calls upon his great scientific and creative heroes--above all, Darwin, Freud, and William James. For Sacks, these thinkers were constant companions from an early age. The questions they explored--the meaning of evolution, the roots of creativity, and the nature of consciousness--lie at the heart of science and of this book. The River of Consciousness demonstrates Sacks's unparalleled ability to make unexpected connections, his sheer joy in knowledge, and his unceasing, timeless endeavor to understand what makes us human.

Uncle Tungsten

Uncle Tungsten PDF Author: Oliver Sacks
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0804172153
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Get Book Here

Book Description
From the distinguished neurologist who is also one of the most remarkable storytellers of our time—a riveting memoir of his youth and his love affair with science, as unexpected and fascinating as his celebrated case histories. “A rare gem…. Fresh, joyous, wistful, generous, and tough-minded.” —The New York Times Book Review Long before Oliver Sacks became the bestselling author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Awakenings, he was a small English boy fascinated by metals—also by chemical reactions (the louder and smellier the better), photography, squids and cuttlefish, H.G. Wells, and the periodic table. In this endlessly charming and eloquent memoir, Sacks chronicles his love affair with science and the magnificently odd and sometimes harrowing childhood in which that love affair unfolded. In Uncle Tungsten we meet Sacks’ extraordinary family, from his surgeon mother (who introduces the fourteen-year-old Oliver to the art of human dissection) and his father, a family doctor who imbues in his son an early enthusiasm for housecalls, to his “Uncle Tungsten,” whose factory produces tungsten-filament lightbulbs. We follow the young Oliver as he is exiled at the age of six to a grim, sadistic boarding school to escape the London Blitz, and later watch as he sets about passionately reliving the exploits of his chemical heroes—in his own home laboratory. Uncle Tungsten is a crystalline view of a brilliant young mind springing to life, a story of growing up which is by turns elegiac, comic, and wistful, full of the electrifying joy of discovery.