And How Are You, Dr. Sacks?: A Biographical Memoir of Oliver Sacks

by Lawrence Weschler

Overview

The untold story of Dr. Oliver Sacks, his own most singular patient

"[An] engrossing biographical memoir. 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

The author Lawrence Weschler began spending time with Oliver Sacks in the early 1980s, when he set out to profile the neurologist for his own new employer, The New Yorker. Almost a decade earlier, Dr. Sacks had published his masterpiece Awakenings—the account of his long-dormant patients’ miraculous but troubling return to life in a Bronx hospital ward. But the book had hardly been an immediate success, and the rumpled clinician was still largely unknown. Over the ensuing four years, the two men worked closely together until, for wracking personal reasons, Sacks asked Weschler to abandon the profile, a request to which Weschler acceded. The two remained close friends, however, across 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 table talk and extravagant personality in vivid relief, casting himself as a beanpole Sancho to Sacks’s capacious Quixote. We see Sacks rowing and ranting and caring deeply; composing the essays that would form The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat; recalling his turbulent drug-fueled younger days; helping his patients and exhausting his friends; 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. And all the while he is pouring out a stream of glorious, ribald, hilarious, and often profound conversation that establishes him as one of the great talkers of the age. Here is the definitive portrait of Sacks as our preeminent romantic scientist, a self-described “clinical ontologist” whose entire practice revolved around the single fundamental question he effectively 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250619600
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	11/10/2020
Pages:	400
Sales rank:	533,240
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Lawrence Weschler, a longtime veteran of The New Yorker and a regular contributor to NPR, is the director emeritus of the New York Institute of the Humanities at NYU and the author of nearly twenty books, including Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, Everything That Rises, and Vermeer in Bosnia.

Table of Contents

Prologue 3

Part I Getting to Know Him

1 Going for a Row 19

2 Early Childhood, a Harrowing Exile, Cruel Judaism, Homosexuality, and a Mother's Curse 27

3 Conversations with Bob Rodman and Thorn Gunn in California 35

4 A Visit to the American Museum of Natural History in New York and Lunch at a Japanese Restaurant 49

5 Oliver's Cousins Abba Eban and Carmel Ross 60

6 From California to New York (1962-1967) 65

7 The Migraine Clinic (1966-1968) 73

8 The Awakenings Drama (1968-1975) 79

9 On Rounds with Oliver at Beth Abraham 107

10 Auden and Luria 113

11 A Visit with Oliver to London, including Conversations with Eric Korn, Jonathan Miller, and Colin Haycraft 128

12 On Rounds with Oliver at the Little Sisters and Bronx State 184

13 Ward 23 196

14 John the Touretter 202

Part II How He Was (the Passing Months)

15 The Blockage Begins to Break (1982-1983) 221

16 The Leg Book Shambles Toward Publication as Oliver Hazards a Neurology of the Soul (the First Half of 1984) 252

17 The Publication, at Long Last, of the Leg Book; Its Reception; Sancho Launches into His Profile and Is Stopped (the Second Half of 1984) 282

Part III Afterwards

18 Dear Friends (1985-2005) 305

19 A Digression on the Question of Reliability and the Nature of Romantic Science 336

20 His Own Life (2005-2015) 347

Postscript 365

Acknowledgments 369

Index 371

Editorial Reviews

"Provide[s] striking glimpses into a remarkable life. Weschler resurrects the interviews he did in the early ’80s with Sacks’s friends and colleagues, and with Sacks himself, who illuminates his insistence not merely on the humanity of patients who suffered everything from extreme Tourette’s to severe amnesia, but also on something spiritual within them . . . Compellingly, Weschler intertwines Sacks’s searching empathy with his sheer strangeness." —Daniel Bergner, The New York Times Book Review

"Lawrence Weschler, a staff writer at The New Yorker from 1981 to 2002, has now given us a companion volume to [Oliver Sacks's] On the Move . . . With a rabbinical zest for ideas and disputation, these two Jewish intellectuals exchanged books and essays (by T. S. Eliot, Hannah Arendt, Albert Camus, Thomas Bernhard) and discussed them over Chinese food, or in each other’s homes . . . The results are stirring." —Scott Sherman, Times Literary Supplement

"[an] engrossing biographical memoir. This is Sacks at full blast: on endless ward rounds, observing his post-encephalitic patients . . . exulting over horseshoe crabs and chunks of Iceland spar. Weschler ends by speculating that Sacks altered neurological practice itself through his attentive compassion for the patients who feature in his stories." —Barbara Kiser, Nature

“Written by one brilliant writer about another, this remarkable book is, in part, about the craft of writing . . . Weschler is a wonderful reporter . . . There are pages on conversations over dinner, and backstories on Awakenings and other books. The chapters have the feel of notes shaken out of folders, but they are beautifully readable and detailed. You feel as if you were at dinner with him, and Oliver has just paused to take a sip of water.” —T.M. Luhrmann, The American Scholar

"A rich, wry pleasure . . . Weschler uses [his] talent for dot-connecting to portray neurologist and author Oliver Sacks . . . [this] affectionate memoir reveals a man who was, at his core, propelled by wonder." —Karen Schechner, Bookforum

"This latest memoir . . . is drawn from four years of extraordinary conversations in the early 1980s between writer Lawrence Weschler and Sacks . . . The result is a revelatory and poignant read–a gently voyeuristic glimpse inside one of the most eccentrically brilliant minds of the past century in all its neurotic, melancholic and triumphant complexity . . . What Weschler gives us is a moving glimpse of a man in motion and a loving friendship." —Natasha Mitchell, The Sydney Morning Herald

"In genre terms, [this book is] neither fish nor fowl but, rather, some other odd, often delightful animal." —The New Yorker

"In 1981, Lawrence Weschler, a New Yorker staff writer, began interviewing the brilliant neurologist Oliver Sacks . . . Their friendship endured, providing a lifetime of material. Shortly before his death in 2015, Sacks told his old friend it was time to publish: “Now, do it! You have to.” And Weschler has, in spades." —Sarah Murdoch, Toronto Star

"A wonderful portrayal of a brilliant, eccentric man." —People

"A deeply personal account of the acclaimed neurologist . . . A thoroughly engaging and enchanting story." —Kirkus (starred review)

"Oliver Sacks . . . comes across as a fascinating head case himself in this rollicking memoir . . . Sacks’s many fans will love this entertaining portrait of a charismatic original." —Publishers Weekly

"A unique account that reads like an extended, erudite, and entertaining New Yorker article . . . With Weschler's examination, Sacks's larger-than-life presence is humanized . . . Recommended for readers who wish they had had the privilege of knowing Sacks while he was alive." —Library Journal

"Weschler serves up a potpourri of conversations, diary entries, interviews, letters and reportage to paint a vibrant portrait of his friend's fully engaged, at times frenetic, life . . . this blend of journalistic objectivity and subjective engagement in Sacks's daily life enlarges and complements the neurologist's self-portrait." —Harvey Freedenberg, Shelf Awareness

“The story of Lawrence Weschler’s faithful four-decade friendship with the amazing Oliver Sacks offers pleasures and amazements on every page. This loving but unblinking portrait will delight fans of Dr. Sacks as well as devotees of Weschler’s always-pathfinding nonfiction.”
—Ian Frazier, staff writer at The New Yorker and author of Travels in Siberia

“This is one of the best examples I have ever read of a biographical memoir made luminous by the exquisite sympathy that sometimes develops between subject and writer. Really, an achievement!”
—Vivian Gornick, author of The Odd Woman and the City

“Two offbeat and complicated men step into a rowboat; a thirty-year intellectual romance ensues. No one but Lawrence Weschler could tell the story with as much polymathic perversity and emotional resonance. Oliver Sacks is such a remarkably literary character that reading this book feels like devouring a novel.”
—Laura Kipnis, author of Unwanted Advances

“And How Are You, Dr. Sacks? is an enthralling, humorous, and comprehending memoir of the life and work of Oliver Sacks. It is more besides. This beautiful book is the product of the decades-long friendship that came into existence as the brilliant and ambitious journalist took on the project of profiling the beloved neurologist. Weschler brings to his subject something like the same personal investment and engagement that Sacks himself brought to his individual patients. How marvelous, and how improbable, and what a fitting tribute to Oliver Sacks that in Lawrence Weschler he meets his narrative match!”
—Alva Noë, author of Infinite Baseball and Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature

“The posthumous Oliver Sacks lives on in this deeply empathic memoir. As much collaborator as interviewer, Lawrence Wechsler knows when to probe and when to remain silent. You’d think Sacks had covered it all in his numerous books, but luckily for us there turn out to be corners as yet unexplored and fresh insights to be gleaned from more familiar biographical territory. In this candid portrait, we feel even more intensely and organically the bond Sacks shared with his patients.”
—Molly Haskell, author of Steven Spielberg: A Life in Films

From the Publisher

Jonathan Davis is a top-notch narrator. Here he gives a nicely drawn rendition of a larger-than-life neurologist/author/caregiver. The late Oliver Sacks is presented as flamboyant, impulsive, intuitive, and brilliant. He was born in Great Britain—Davis uses a slight British accent to good effect—but practiced mostly in the States, where his passions were weight lifting, motorcycles, gastronomy, swimming, and writing. He is the author of such clinical memoirs as AWAKENINGS and THE MAN WHO MISTOOK HIS WIFE FOR A HAT. Author Weschler is American, and there are other nationalities that pop up here and there, which are handled easily by Davis. The narration flows along to excellent effect. D.R.W. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

OCTOBER 2019 - AudioFile

★ 2019-04-28
A deeply personal account of the acclaimed neurologist.

Former New Yorker staff writer Weschler (Waves Passing in the Night: Walter Murch in theLand of Astrophysicists, 2017, etc.) concedes that this varied mix of biography and memoir is not a full biography of Oliver Sacks (1933-2015). Rather, the author focuses on the early 1980s, when he was regularly meeting with Sacks, "serving as a sort of Boswell to his Johnson," compiling notebooks for a profile he planned to write. For Weschler, these years are the "hinge of [Sacks'] professional and creative progress," when this "virtual hermit would be on the precipice of worldwide fame." What emerges is a dazzling portrait of a "graphomaniac," a "grand soliloquizer," an "unparalleled clinician," a "studiously detached naturalist," prodigious swimmer, weight lifter, and reckless motorcycle speed demon. Weschler learned a number of intimate details about Sacks, including that he was gay: "I have lived a life wrapped in concealment and wracked by inhibition," Sacks told him. He asked Weschler not to publish the profile, and it was only when he was dying that he told him: "Now….You have to." Much of the book is told in Sacks' own words, which Weschler transcribed, or from handwritten letters Sacks sent him, giving the narrative a rich immediacy. Early on, he realized Sacks was a prodigy who possessed a "strange consciousness and awareness…of his own oddity." Weschler also interviewed Sacks' close friends, including the poet Thom Gunn and Jonathan Miller, the physician member of the comedy revue Beyond the Fringe. The author chronicles his time spent with Sacks on his rounds with patients as he brilliantly diagnosed their neurological illnesses. He joined Sacks when his bestseller, Awakenings, was being filmed; Sacks and Robin Williams became friends. Also included is a forthright "digression" on Sacks' propensity to exaggerate or make things up. The two were still very close near the end, and Weschler intimately recounts Sacks' final years.

A thoroughly engaging and enchanting story.

Kirkus Reviews