On The Move: A Life
When Oliver Sacks was twelve years old, a perceptive schoolmaster wrote in his report: “Sacks will go far, if he does not go too far.” It is now abundantly clear that Sacks has never stopped going. From its opening pages on his youthful obsession with motorcycles and speed, On the Move is infused with his restless energy. As he recounts his experiences as a young neurologist in the early 1960s, first in California, where he struggled with drug addiction and then in New York, where he discovered a long forgotten illness in the back wards of a chronic hospital, we see how his engagement with patients comes to define his life.
With unbridled honesty and humor, Sacks shows us that the same energy that drives his physical passions — weightlifting and swimming—also drives his cerebral passions. 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—Thom Gunn, A.R. Luria, W.H. Auden, Francis Crick — who influenced him. On the Move is the story of a brilliantly unconventional physician and writer — and of the man who has illuminated the many ways that the brain makes us human.
Starred review in 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.
http://www.oliversacks.com/books-by-oliver-sacks/on-the-move/
Oliver Sacks Dies at 82; Neurologist and Author Explored the Brain’s Quirks
Dr. Oliver Sacks was a neurologist and best-selling author who explored the brain’s strangest pathways. His work touched Hollywood, theater, even opera, and his legacy lasts in the stories he told.
By POH SI TENG on Publish Date August 30, 2015. Photo by Sara Krulwich/The New York Times.
Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and acclaimed author who explored some of the brain’s strangest pathways in best-selling case histories like “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” using his patients’ disorders as starting points for eloquent meditations on consciousness and the human condition, died Sunday at his home in New York City. He was 82.
The cause was cancer, said Kate Edgar, his longtime personal assistant.
Dr. Sacks announced in February, in an Op-Ed essay in The New York Times, that an earlier melanoma in his eye had spread to his liver and that he was in the late stages of terminal cancer.
As a medical doctor and a writer, Dr. Sacks achieved a level of popular renown rare among scientists. More than a million copies of his books are in print in the United States, his work was adapted for film and stage, and he received about 10,000 letters a year. (“I invariably reply to people under 10, over 90 or in prison,” he once said.)
Describing his patients’ struggles and sometimes uncanny gifts, Dr. Sacks helped introduce syndromes like Tourette’s or Asperger’s to a general audience. But he illuminated their characters as much as their conditions; he humanized and demystified them.
In his emphasis on case histories, Dr. Sacks modeled himself after a questing breed of 19th-century physicians, who well understood how little they and their peers knew about the workings of the human animal and who saw medical science as a vast, largely uncharted wilderness to be tamed.
“I had always liked to see myself as a naturalist or explorer,” Dr. Sacks wrote in “A Leg to Stand On” (1984), about his own experiences recovering from muscle surgery. “I had explored many strange, neuropsychological lands — the furthest Arctics and Tropics of neurological disorder.”
His intellectual curiosity took him even further. On his website, Dr. Sacks maintained a partial list of topics he had written about. It included aging, amnesia, color, deafness, dreams, ferns, Freud, hallucinations, neural Darwinism, phantom limbs, photography, pre-Columbian history, swimming and twins
“I am very tenacious, for better or worse,” he wrote in “A Leg to Stand On.” “If my attention is engaged, I cannot disengage it. This may be a great strength, or weakness. It makes me an investigator. It makes me an obsessional.”
He was also a man of contradictions: candid and guarded, gregarious and solitary, clinical and compassionate, scientific and poetic, British and almost American. “In 1961, I declared my intention to become a United States citizen, which may have been a genuine intention, but I never got round to it,” he told The Guardian in 2005.
Dr. Sacks first won widespread attention in 1973 for his book “Awakenings,” about a group of patients with an atypical form of encephalitis at Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx. When Dr. Sacks started his clinical career there, in 1966, many of the patients had been catatonic, locked inside themselves for decades as a result of their “sleeping sickness.”
Dr. Sacks gave them the drug L-dopa, which was just beginning to be recognized as a treatment for similar symptoms in patients with Parkinson’s, then watched as they emerged into a world they did not recognize. Some responded better than others — both to the drug and to their changed circumstances — and Dr. Sacks used his book to explore the differences and celebrate his patients’ limited rebirth.