Letters

by Oliver Sacks Narrated by Not Yet Available

Overview

The letters of one of the greatest observers of the human species, revealing his passion for life and work, friendship and art, medicine and society, and the richness of his relationships with friends, family, and fellow intellectuals over the decades, collected here for the first time

Dr. Oliver Sacks-who describes himself in these pages as a “philosophical physician” and a “neuropathological Talmudist”-wrote letters throughout his life: to his parents and his beloved Auntie Len, to friends and colleagues from London, Oxford, California, and around the world. The letters begin with his arrival in America as a young man, eager to establish himself away from the confines of postwar England, and carry us through his bumpy early career in medicine and the discovery of his writer's voice; his weight-lifting, motorcycle-riding years and his explosive seasons of discovery with the patients who populate his book Awakenings; his growing interest in matters of sight and the musical brain; his many friendships and exchanges with writers, artists, and scientists (to say nothing of astronauts, botanists, and mathematicians), and his deep gratitude for all these relationships at the end of his life.

Sensitively introduced and edited by Kate Edgar, Sacks's longtime editor, the letters deliver a portrait of Sacks as he wrestles with the workings of the brain and mind. We see, through his eyes, the beginnings of modern neuroscience, following the thought processes of one of the great intellectuals of our time, whose words, as evidenced in these pages, were unfailingly shaped with generosity and wonder toward other people.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

"Oliver Sacks’s letters are superb—fluent, brilliant, candid, intimate—and some of them are deliriously passionate. Oliver could write a multi-page love letter as well as a lengthy analysis of a drug state or a neurological condition. Taken together, over more than fifty years, they constitute an autobiography in epistolary form." —Paul Theroux, author of The Mosquito Coast and Burma Sahib

“Be prepared to discover a world of human treasures in the letters of Oliver Sacks. Sacks wrote copiously to family and friends, as expected, but he also wrote abundantly to several colleagues in the universe of biology, neuroscience and psychology, during a seminal period (which includes the last two decades of the twentieth century and the first two decades of the twenty-first). One marvel here is that Sacks’ literary genius manages to reveal both sides of a conversation, although we are only made privy to his perspective on the issues.” —Antonio Damasio, author of Feeling and Knowing

Product Details

BN ID:	2940191571782
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	11/05/2024
Edition description:	Unabridged