Neurologist Oliver Sacks passed away last month at the age of 82, leaving behind a tremendous and inspirational body of work. Announcing the return of his cancer in the New York Times earlier this year, Sacks expressed his gratitude for the life he'd been able to live.
We're grateful for the wonderful publications he gave us. Sacks was a superb writer, a keenly observant thinker and a popular physician. His uniquely humane approach to neurological diseases makes for fascinating reading. He has reportedly left behind several nearly finished books, which will see some form of publication, thanks to his recently established foundation. If you're new to his work, here are some suggestions on where to start.
Breakout Success
Awakenings is the book that made Sacks famous and which was made into a sensitive 1990 drama (Awakenings) that was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture, starring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro (who was nominated for best actor). The book concerns the astonishing true story of a group of patients who'd contracted sleeping sickness during an epidemic after World War I and remained in a kind of coma for decades until Sacks treated them with a new medicine in 1969 that brought them back to life.
Clinical Tales
Sacks' other most popular books include two collections of his fascinating cases: The Man Who Mistook His Wife for A Hat and Other Clinical Tales (which was made into an opera) and An Anthropologist on Mars. They're remarkable not just because the cases themselves are fascinating (an artist with no sense of color, a surgeon with compulsive tics, etc.), but also because Sacks is that rare doctor who has a gift for seeing the whole human being and not just the disease. These cases raise fascinating fundamental questions about the human experience.
Studies
Sacks has also written several books that go more in depth on particular topics, including Hallucinations, Musicophilia, The Mind's Eye, Migraine, Seeing Voices and The Island of the Colorblind.
Biographies
Finally, Sacks has written 2 book of autobiography, including Uncle Tungsten about his childhood of curiosity about science, and a bestselling biography of his adult life, published just months before he died, On the Move.
Search for all formats and editions of books by Oliver Sacks held by the library.
Followers
If you like Oliver Sacks' books and are looking for other reading suggestions, try these: The Man Who Wasn't There by Anil Ananthaswamy, The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons by Sam Kean, The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge, The Tell-tale Brain by V.S. Ramachandran and A Mind Apart by Susanne Antonetta.
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