A Humanism of the Abyss March 23, 2023
When we visit the doctor’s office, we fill out forms and check items on lists. Age? Ethnicity? History of heart disease? Allergies to medications? Cancer in the family? To enter the American health care system is to grow accustomed to thinking of you...
All Was Not Well With the Doctor September 28, 2020
With his beard, his burliness, his ready smile and his clear, steady, British-accented voice, the physician and writer Oliver Sacks was perhaps the Platonic ideal of the avuncular white male genius. But as comfortable and comforting a figure as he be...
Memories of Oliver Sacks’s Shy, Eccentric Brilliance December 12, 2019
he first time I met my cousin Oliver Sacks I was fourteen. He was twenty-four, huge, shy, with a voluminous black beard. He was family but, as he grew up in London and I in Bath, somehow our paths had never crossed. I’d been warned he was a bit weird...
Field Notes on a Beautiful Friendship September 17, 2019
Written by one brilliant writer about another, this remarkable book is, in part, about the craft of writing. But in the main, it’s an account of author Lawrence Weschler’s friendship with Oliver Sacks, a man whom he describes as “impressively erudite...
My Travels with Oliver Sacks August 05, 2019
“L-L-Lowell, the English are the result of too much proper breeding,” said Oliver Sacks, neurologist and author, in December 1987. It was my first trip overseas. I was in my early thirties, Oliver in his mid-fifties, and I was working as his photogra...
Truth, Beauty, and Oliver Sacks May 17, 2019
Readers of The New York Review, to which he was a regular contributor over many years, need no introduction to Oliver Sacks. A number of the pieces in Everything in Its Place, his second posthumous volume, which collects published and unpublished wor...
Gratitude December 07, 2015
The Hilarious Errors of Oliver Sacks June 08, 2015
For 30 years, since the 1985 publication of “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” neurologist Oliver Sacks has entertained and enlightened readers with his case studies of patients, each one sharply observed and yet generously humane. Now, in his...
Oliver Sacks Is Seeing Things November 09, 2012
Oliver Sacks may be the father of the popular neurological best-seller, but he’s distinctly different from the current crop of authors, be they as substantive as Daniel Kahneman (“Thinking Fast and Slow”) or as dodgy as Jonah Lehrer. The latest it...