Oliver Sacks

“My predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved. I have been given much and I have given something in return. Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.”
—Oliver Sacks
No writer has succeeded in capturing the medical and human drama of illness as honestly and as eloquently as Oliver Sacks. ...

An investigation into the types, physiological sources, and cultural resonances of hallucinations traces everything from the disorientations of sleep and intoxication to the manifestations of injury and illness.

"In July 2013, Oliver Sacks turned eighty and wrote a ... piece in The New York Times about the prospect of old age and the freedom he envisioned for himself in binding together the thoughts and feelings of a lifetime. Eighteen months later, he was given a diagnosis of terminal cancer--which he announced publically in another piece in The New York Times. Gratitude is Sacks's meditation on why life continued to enthrall him even as he faced the all-too-close...

"Two weeks before his death, Oliver Sacks outlined the contents of The River of Consciousness, the last book he would oversee. The best-selling author of On the Move, Musicophilia, and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Sacks is known for his illuminating case histories about people living with neurological conditions at the far borderlands of human experience. But his grasp of science was not restricted to neuroscience or medicine; he was fascinated...

"A groundbreaking book that upends conventional thinking about autism and suggests a broader model for acceptance, understanding, and full participation in society for people who think differently"--

Describes the author's work with institutionalized patients at Mount Carmel Hospital and the dramatic effects of the drug L-DOPA on twenty patients suffering from encephalitic Parkinsonism.

In this work the author tells the stories of people who are able to navigate the world and communicate with others despite losing what many of us consider indispensable senses and abilities: the power of speech, the capacity to recognize faces, the sense of three dimensional space, the ability to read, the sense of sight. For all of these people, the challenge is to adapt to a radically new way of being in the world. There is Lilian, a concert pianist...

The author -- an animal scientist who has designed one-third of all the livestock-handling facilities in the United States -- describes her life with autism and how she has used her strong visual sensibility to cope with it. Writing from the dual perspectives of a scientist and an autistic person, Grandin tells us how that country is experienced by its inhabitants and how she managed to breach its boundaries to function in the outside world. What...

A month after receiving a fatal diagnosis in January 2015, Oliver Sacks sat down for a series of filmed interviews in his apartment in New York City. For eighty hours, surrounded by family, friends, and notebooks from six decades of thinking and writing about the brain, he talked about his life and work, his abiding sense of wonder at the natural world, and the place of human beings within it. Drawing on these deeply personal reflections, as well...