Oliver sacks biography chapters

And Endeavor Are Paying attention, Dr. Sacks? A Story Memoir hold Oliver Sacks by Writer Weschler; Farrar, Straus accept Giroux, Cardinal pp., $28

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Sacks also challenging a vast gift guarantor words, identify which crystalclear displayed say publicly same disorderly intensity. Weschler calls him a graphomaniac, and undeniably, Sacks wrote feverishly. Agreed apparen

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Biography and Biology: Oliver Sacks

Abstract

The name Oliver Sacks (1933–2015) became a household word after he published his book Awakenings in 1973. This chapter introduces him as a doctor, a writer, and a neurologist who reported on his own neurological conditions. Like the previous chapter on Iris Murdoch, this chapter emphasizes the value of case studies, a methodology Sacks used to introduce his patients as more than their pathologies. This approach is also a core aim of this book. As this chapter demonstrates, Dr. Sacks’ case studies allowed him to distinguish between studying neurological disturbance in terms of how the nervous system is organized and learning from the actual people who were struggling to adapt and survive. Particular attention is given to four of his works: (1) Migraine: The Evolution of a Common Disorder, published in 1970, was released at the beginning his career. (2) Awakenings, published in 1973, made him a worldwide figure. (3) A Leg to Stand On (1984), a more personal book, tells of an accident Sacks had in Norway that resulted in a disturbance of proprioception and how music proved therapeutic. (4) “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” published in 1985, was originally presented as a case involving agnosias. The autopsy showed a

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Full speed through life

The frequent surprises in Oliver Sacks’ guardedly self-revelatory autobiography begin with the book’s cover photo. There we see a buff, leather-jacketed Sacks astride his new BMW motorcycle in Greenwich Village in 1961. Who knew that the genial, gray-bearded, best-selling writer-neurologist once portrayed by Robin Williams in the movie Awakenings (1990) was such a hunk in his late 20s? Or a state-champion lifter on Southern California’s Muscle Beach? Or a physician addicted for a while to amphetamines? Or a closeted gay man who had sex during the week of his 40th birthday and then not again until he fell in love at 75?

Revelations like these will keep a reader turning the pages of On the Move. But Sacks’ book, self-effacingly subtitled “A Life,” actually has much more to say than these headline grabbers would indicate. The book is a kind of reckoning, a summing up, of Sacks’ growth as an intellectual and a writer. Born in England to a prominent Jewish family, Sacks was from an early age a ceaseless letter writer and journal keeper; he draws liberally on those writings to give readers a sense of who he was as a younger man. Many of this autobiography’s 12 chapters offer the backstories to Sacks’