Review by Choice Review
The many fans of Oliver Sacks will be pleased to see this selection of 33 essays, seven previously unpublished, in print. The range of topics is wide. We learn of Dr. Sacks's love of swimming, his admiration for the chemist Humphry Davy, the importance of genuine asylums, his skepticism about accounts of the afterlife, and the wonder of gardens. The range of his interests is admirable and astonishing, adding special poignancy to the posthumous publication of this book. The case studies may be less compelling than some of the ones previously published but nonetheless demonstrate his care for patients and the striking way in which his humanity and medical skills were intertwined. In the last chapter, written after he knew his illness was terminal and as he reflected on the threat posed by climate change, he states, "As I face my own impending departure from the world, I have to believe in this--that mankind and our planet will survive, that life will continue, and that this will not be our final hour." One can only hope that this eloquent statement is prophetic. Summing Up: Recommended. General readers, undergraduates, and professionals. --Steen Halling, emeritus, Seattle University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
THE WORD "ONEIRISM" is more than just an obscure exception to the "i" before "e" rhymelet. It also exemplifies the exceptionally advanced and sometimes stymying lexical breadth of Oliver Sacks's writing - never more challenging than in this last, posthumous book, a collection of previously uncollected and/or unpublished essays. ("Oneiric," in case you were wondering, means "related to dreams or dreaming.") The book's many other linguistic rarities include "festination," "bradykinesia," "metanoia," "achromatopsia." Occasionally Sacks pauses for a definition. More often he doesn't. This is a good thing. Many of these words are specific to Sacks's medical specialty, neurology, as chronicled in his often best-selling books ("The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat," "A Leg to Stand On," "Awakenings," this last adapted into a film). Their meanings could have been spelled out, perhaps, but often only with condescendingly grade-school diction. In other words, this obscure terminology serves to honor the reader. If you don't know our meanings, these terms imply, trust us that we are carefully chosen, as we trust you to look us up. "Everything in Its Place": a lame title. Especially since the topics here are actually a wonderfully odd lot, despite the worthy effort to group them into sections - "First Loves," "Clinical Tales" and "Life Continues." Why not name the whole book after its essay "Anybody Out There?," about the possibility of extraterrestrial life ("It is not clear whether life has to 'advance,' whether evolution must take place"). Or after "Summer of Madness," an account of the thrilling but dangerous euphoria of a young woman named Sally who, in the manic stage of her manic depression, "breaks." After haranguing strangers in the street, shaking them, demanding their attention, she suddenly runs headlong into a stream of traffic, convinced that she can bring it to a halt by sheer willpower. As it happens, this essay provides Sacks the chance to address a truly serious literary issue - one that troubled Sally's father, Michael Greenberg, as he considered writing about his daughter's illness. (He finally did, more than a decade after this onset of her mania, in an excellent, unflinching memoir called "Hurry Down Sunshine.") It troubles Sacks, too: "The question of 'telling,' of publishing detailed accounts of patients' lives, their vulnerabilities, their illness, is a matter of great moral delicacy, fraught with perils and pitfalls of every sort." This ethical dilemma is of concern for most if not all writers of medical and psychiatric case-study books, both physicians and laypersons. In fact, there exists now an extensive literature on the subject, including a 2017 HopkinsMedicine article called "The Right to Write About Patients," by Dr. Benjamin Oldfield and Lauren Small (an expert in the field of narrative medicine). In a more recent, widely cited piece in The Huffington Post, Dr. Danielle Ofri asked, "Doctor-Writers: What Are the Ethics?" Sacks has occasionally fallen victim to such moral criticism of his own writing. He was called "the man who mistook his patients for a literary career" by the British academic and disability rights activist Tom Shakespeare. The author G. Thomas Couser called his work "a highbrow freak show that invites its audience to gawk at human oddities." But there is an argument being made now that our increasing appetite for stories about the human element in medicine and science proceeds, at least in part, from the erosion of mythology and religion as convincing schemas for understanding the human condition. This suggests that there may be something bardic about these modern writers/doctors - Sacks, Ofri, Atul Gawande, Daniel Kahneman, James Gleick, Jerome Groopman, Abraham Verghese, Rebecca Skloot, even Mary Roach. They are searching for meaning and coherence within particular lives touched by random afflictions and the dizzying advances in science, rather than in any form of divine providence. As Sacks himself has said, " I would hope that a reading of what I write shows respect and appreciation, not any wish to expose or exhibit for the thrill... but it's a delicate business." Like all performers, those of us who write for an audience do so for three main reasons - two of them noble, the third a little darker: 1. To share information and narratives that will interest, enlighten, move, entertain readers; 2. To help create, out of silence and solitude, a community or communities of people drawn to this information and these narratives; 3. Usually on an unconscious level, to gain for ourselves attention and admiration from strangers - generally as anonymous stand-ins for parents who we think in one way or another failed to adequately recognize our specialness. So, yes, Oliver Sacks's writing, like any writing, partakes in showboating, even when cloaked in modesty and self-effacement. More to the point, though, the people he writes about, here and elsewhere, do often suffer from what "normal" people might think of as one kind of peculiarity (maybe even freakishness) or another. Even in the first, mainly autobiographical section of the book, Sacks records his own early idiosyncratic passions with a straight face that may be an attempt to normalize his own budding obsessions - among them long-distance and endurance swimming and weight-lifting. The first essay, "Water Babies," recounts the Sacks family's penchant for swimming. Sacks recalls that he "was named Top Distance Swimmer at the Mount Vernon Y, in Westchester: I swam 500 lengths - six miles - in the contest and would have continued, but the judges said, 'Enough! Please go home.' " As a schoolboy, Sacks spent three weeks in Millport, Scotland, studying marine biology. There he became preoccupied with cuttlefish, collecting them from the fishermen who had no use for them. He stored them in buckets of salt water and alcohol - not enough alcohol, as it turned out - in the basement of a friend's temporarily empty summer house, for subsequent experimentation. "A few days later," he writes, "we heard dull thuds emanating from the basement, and going down to investigate, we encountered a grotesque scene: The cuttlefish, insufficiently preserved, had putrefied and fermented, and the gases produced had exploded the jars and blown great lumps of cuttlefish all over the walls and floor; there were even shreds of cuttlefish stuck to the ceiling." Explosions - and stuckness - of different, neurological sorts went on to fascinate Sacks throughout his career. In the "Clinical Tales" section, an essay called "Travels With Lowell" tells of visiting La Crete, a Mennonite community in Canada populated by Touretters of many intensities and variations. On the other hand, in "Cold Storage," thyroid injections bring back to active life a patient named "Uncle Toby," who has been "suspended ... in some strange icy stupor," his body temperature 30 degrees below the human average, for seven years. In the book's final section, Sacks's lens expands from memoir and clinical tales to a helter-skeltering of topics: life on other planets; his love of herring ("Clupeophilia"); searching for ferns that burst through the meager soil on the railroad abutments on Park Avenue. Life bursts through all of Oliver Sacks's writing. He was and will remain a brilliant singularity. It's hard to call to mind one dull passage in his work - one dull sentence, for that matter. At the end of this book, and very near the end of his life, in "Filter Fish," he even manages to give gefilte fish, of all things, a wonderful star turn: "In what are (barring a miracle) my last weeks of life - so queasy that I am averse to almost every food and have difficulty swallowing ... I have rediscovered the joys of gefilte fish.... Gefilte fish will usher me out of this life, as it ushered me into it, 82 years ago." DANIEL MENAKER, the former fiction editor at The New Yorker and former editor in chief of Random House, is the author of seven books.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 12, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
The third of Sacks' posthumous books is a gathering of previously uncollected and hitherto unpublished pieces as well as introductions to books by other authors (among the last, the foreword to Christopher Payne's brilliant photographic study, Asylum, 2009). As polished and as intimately voiced the author seems our bosom friend far more than an authority as Sacks is at his best, these writings vary in length from a New York Review of Books essay to a two-page miniature, and each is impossible to put down unfinished. Their manners are narrative (as in his most popular form, the case history); reminiscent ( First Love for the cuttlefish); and eulogistic ( Humphry Davy: Poet of Chemistry ). Besides neurological cases, specific subjects include swimming, the museums of London's South Kensington, hiccups, fern hunting on Park Avenue, herring, Spalding Gray, gardens, little-known great books, the periodic table, vision loss, and libraries. Since the 1970s, Anglo-American literature has boasted an astonishing number of excellent writing physicians and scientists. Consider Oliver Sacks their dean.--Ray Olson Copyright 2019 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this lovely collection of previously unpublished essays, the late, celebrated author and neurologist Sacks (The River of Consciousness) muses on his career, his youth, the mental health field, and much more. Readers will learn of influences that molded Sacks's brilliant mind, from the cephalopod specimens at the Natural History Museum in London to the "visionary, mystical" 19th-century scientist Humphry Davy, whom Sacks dubs the "Poet of Chemistry." Of the many remarkable essays on medical conditions, "Travels with Lowell" stands out for its sensitivity and nuance, as Sacks travels the world alongside a photographer with Tourette's, interviewing others with the condition, including one man who could trace incidents of the syndrome back six generations in his family, yet was not officially diagnosed until age 38. Sacks also recalls being consulted in the case of actor/writer Spalding Gray, who became desperately, compulsively depressed after a brain injury in 2001 and died by suicide three years later. Sacks's gentle, ruminative voice is a salve when investigating difficult subject matter, but there are plenty of lighter moments as well, as in a brief discussion of a topic dear to his heart-New York City's many and varied streetlamps. Piercingly insightful and delightfully strange, Sacks's final collection is a treat for the chronically curious. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
This eclectic and satisfying collection of essays spans myriad topics: childhood remembrances, case histories, travelog, as well as explorations of various subjects that piqued the late neurologist Sacks's interest over his lifetime. Thirty-four pieces are included, some of which are published here for the first time (dates and location of earlier publications are noted in the sources and acknowledgements). Reading about Sacks's love of swimming, his lifelong fondness of gefilte fish, and his joy when browsing library stacks is as compelling as reading the more scientific essays chronicling various case histories, aging, and dementia. One noteworthy essay is the previously unpublished "Travels with Lowell," which recounts Sacks's friendship and travels with photojournalist Lowell Handler, who has Tourette's syndrome. In each informative and engaging selection, Sacks writes with his characteristic compassion and attention to detail. VERDICT Recommended primarily for fans of Sacks's earlier works. This final posthumous collection provides one last peek into the author's generous, curious, and brilliant mind. [See Prepub Alert, 10/15/18.]-Ragan O'Malley, Saint Ann's School, Brooklyn © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The acclaimed neurologist and author's spaciousness of mind, humanity, and attachment to all life has its last showcase in this posthumously published collection.Assembled here are a wealth of previously published and unreleased pieces by the gifted neurologist (1933-2015), justly called the "poet laureate of science." As in most of his books, Sacks (The River of Consciousness, 2017, etc.) includes clinical case studies from his medical practice. There is an unusually intriguing discussion of the many sides of Tourette's syndrome as well as a detailed analysis of the misleadingly named "bi-polar" disorder. While underscoring the physician's role in some of the most intimate decisions of a patient's life, the author discusses the aging brain; mania as a biological rather than psychological condition; the various manifestations of dementia; and the folly of a "premature sense of impotence and doom" that can accompany a diagnosis of Alzheimer's. In a lighter vein, Sacks discusses his early fascination with fossil botany and chemistry. He also offers odes to libraries, swimming, museums, the necessity of gardens, and the majesty of the ginkgo. His disquisitions extend further to the ancient building blocks of cyanobacteria and the evolution of earthlike planets, the premonitory power of dreams, photography's transformation of the way we perceive movement and the world, and the hallucinatory nature of out-of-body and near-death experiences, states that are far from supernatural in origin but rather "part of the normal range of human consciousness and experience." Among the many scientists and writers whose oft-forgotten work he praises (sometimes to excess), his essay on pioneering British chemist and poet Humphry Davy is particularly edifying. In the last days of his life, Sacks offered strong lamentations about the book as an endangered species and the loss of civility in an age of cellphones and social media.Balanced and insightful, this valedictory collection offers a fine coda to a remarkable life and career. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
