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Oliver Sacks

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On the Move: A Life (Picador Collection) Kindle Edition

by Oliver Sacks (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.4 3,999 ratings

Book 2 of 2: Oliver Sacks' memoirs

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When Oliver Sacks was twelve years old, a perceptive schoolmaster wrote in his report: 'Sacks will go far, if he does not go too far'. It is now abundantly clear that Sacks has never stopped going . . .

From its opening pages on his youthful obsession with motorcycles and speed, On the Move is infused with his restless energy. As he recounts his experiences as a young neurologist in the early 1960s, first in California and then in New York, where he discovered a long-forgotten illness in the back wards of a chronic hospital, as well as with a group of patients who would define his life, it becomes clear that Sacks's earnest desire for engagement has occasioned unexpected encounters and travels – sending him through bars and alleys, over oceans, and across continents.

With unbridled honesty and humour, Sacks shows us that the same energy that drives his physical passions –bodybuilding, weightlifting, and swimming – also drives his cerebral passions. He writes about his love affairs, both romantic and intellectual, his guilt over leaving his family to come to America, his bond with his schizophrenic brother, and the writers and scientists – Thom Gunn, A. R. Luria, W. H. Auden, Gerald M. Edelman, Francis Crick – who influenced him.

On the Move is the story of a brilliantly unconventional physician and writer – and of the man who has illuminated the many ways that the brain makes us human.

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A Leg to Stand On
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An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales
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WARNING: California’s Proposition 65

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

An Amazon Best Book of May 2015: Oliver Sacks’ On the Move is a disarming book. His honesty, energy, and clear restlessness illuminate each page, drawing the reader in to a life of great achievement in spite of some hurdles. The highest of those hurdles may have been his difficulty with romantic love. The origin of that difficulty can be traced to his mother’s severe reaction upon learning that he was gay: she called him “an abomination.” Sacks forgave his mother for that, even if he couldn’t shake her words. His solution appears to have been just to move on and keep moving—and the entire book is imbued with a sense of movement. This can be seen in his love of motorcycles and weight lifting, in his desire to travel, in his move from England to the United States, and even when he writes of his former addiction to amphetamines. Of course his mind was moving at all times as well, and in this book Sacks continues to write convincingly about the ways our minds make us human. Despite claiming shyness, Sacks amassed an impressive list of friends and acquaintances—from the poets Thom Gunn, Richard Selig, and W.H. Auden, to Francis Crick and Stephen Jay Gould, to Robert De Niro and Robin Williams. And there was always the writing. “I am a storyteller, for better and for worse,” he writes at the end of the book. When I read that line, I realized that I felt like he was sitting in the same room with me. -- Chris Schluep

Review

**A New York Times Notable Book of 2015**

Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“Dr. Sacks writes not only with a doctor’s understanding of medicine and science but also with a Chekhovian sympathy for his patients and a metaphysical appreciation of their emotional quandaries....That writing, which Dr. Sacks says gives him a pleasure ‘unlike any other,’ has also been a gift to his readers—of erudition, sympathy and an abiding understanding of the joys, trials and consolations of the human condition.”

Lauren Slater, Los Angeles Review of Books
“The summation of a life lived with so much breadth and depth that it serves as a primer for how to navigate human existence with humor, humility, passion, speed, intelligence, and ongoing grace — the tale tying together all the stories Sacks has published in his lifetime…. In this book, Sacks reveals himself as a writer, laying bare the process, which was sometimes exquisitely painful and sometimes straightforward; it’s a rare behind-the-scenes glimpse into how one of this country’s most beloved physicians and authors actually plies his craft....Sacks is so vulnerable, so naked, so exposed in the telling of his life that the reader wants to fall in love with him, because what else can you do when a person such as Sacks gives you the gift of such honesty?…. On the Move can be read in many different ways…. In the end, though, what the reader walks away with, or rather, what this reader walked away with, was a field guide on how to live an excellent life, moment by moment, mile by mile, making each droplet count.”

Colin McGinn, Wall Street Journal
“This is a very striking book by a very striking man. It is honest, lucid, passionate, humorous, humane and human (also slightly Martian). The Oliver Sacks you thought you knew may surprise you with his back story…”

Carmela Ciuraru, San Francisco Chronicle
“No matter what he writes about — whether struggling to understand what his patients are going through, or describing his love of swimming or photography — Sacks always seems open to learning more. He appears keenly interested in everything and everyone he encounters. He’s a wonderful storyteller, a gift he says he inherited from his parents, both of whom were doctors. But as he proves again in his latest…book, it’s his keen attentiveness as a listener and observer, and his insatiable curiosity, that makes his work so powerful.”

Heller McAlpin, LA Times
“On the Move is filled with both wonder and wonderments….Sacks’ discursive, revealing memoir chronicles his surprising route to becoming the bard of brain disorders. Pit stops along the way include his biker days (in which he went by his middle name, Wolf), avid weightlifting, experimentation with psychotropic drugs leading to amphetamine addiction, numerous brushes with death, lifelong passion for long-distance swims, and so many carelessly lost manuscripts you can’t help but wonder about Freudian slips. The vivid self-portrait that emerges is of an immoderate risk taker with a brilliant ‘wildly associative mind,’ an enthusiast who regards ‘all neurology, everything as a sort of adventure.’ A teacher’s astute assessment best sums up Sacks’ nature: ‘Sacks will go far, if he does not go too far.’ He has frequently pushed the limits.”

Suzanne Koven, Boston Globe
“Sacks’ empathy and intellectual curiosity, his delight in, as he calls it, ‘joining particulars with generalities’ and, especially, ‘narratives with neuroscience’ —have never been more evident than in his beautifully conceived new book, On The Move. This meta memoir, in which Sacks reconsiders aspects of his life and work that he’s written about in a dozen previous books, is remarkably candid and deeply affecting.”

Colette Bancroft, Tampa Bay Times
“On the Move is entertaining and illuminating and sometimes shocking, and it’s given a deep tinge of poignancy by Sacks’ public announcement in February that he has terminal cancer. If On the Move is his effort, at age 81 and in the face of death, to record a life well lived, he has succeeded beautifully.”

Laura Miller, Salon
“On the Move is an enchanting window on just how much vitality you can pack into four-score years on this planet…"

Tyghe Trimble, Men’s Journal
“What you likely don’t know about Sacks is that he once held a weightlifting record in California, is a serious motorcycle enthusiast, and fell in love at 77. Such moments make On the Move a compelling read. The memoir offers a glimpse into one of the greatest minds of our time, made all the more special by the knowledge that it’s one of his last gifts to a devoted readership.”

Jennie Yabroff, Biographile
“You finish On the Move with a sense of wonder and admiration.”

Melissa Pierson, Daily Beast
“…an unforgettably passionate, joyous journey.”

Jeff Milo, Paste
“An ebullient telling of a remarkable life.”

Dan Cryer, Newsday
“Learning to come to terms with unique patients has given Oliver Sacks permission to come to terms with himself. And what a self this book reveals! A man animated by boundless curiosity, wide-ranging intelligence, gratitude for flawed humanity, perseverance despite setbacks…. Oliver Sacks can never be replaced. We’re lucky to have all the books, including On the Move. It’s intensely, beautifully, incandescently alive."

Alden Mudge, BookPage
“In these pages, Sacks is always on the move, leaping adroitly from one topic to the next. We are swept along by the velocity of his account of a long and eventful life.”

About the Author

Oliver Sacks is a practicing physician and the author of twelve books, including The Mind's Eye, Musicophilia, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and Awakenings (which inspired the Oscar-nominated film). He lives in New York City, where he is a professor of neurology at the NYU School of Medicine.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Muscle Beach

When I finally made it to New York in June of 1961, I borrowed money from a cousin and bought a new bike, a BMW R60—the trustiest of all the BMW models. I wanted no more to do with used bikes, like the R69 which some idiot or criminal had fitted with the wrong pistons, the pistons that had seized up in Alabama.

I spent a few days in New York, and then the open road beckoned me. I covered thousands of miles in my slow, erratic return to California. The roads were wonderfully empty, and going across South Dakota and Wyoming, I would scarcely see another soul for hours. The silence of the bike, the effortlessness of riding, lent a magical, dreamlike quality to my motion.

There is a direct union of oneself with a motorcycle, for it is so geared to one’s proprioception, one’s movements and postures, that it responds almost like part of one’s own body. Bike and rider become a single, indivisible entity; it is very much like riding a horse. A car cannot become part of one in quite the same way.

I arrived back in San Francisco at the end of June, just in time to exchange my bike leathers for the white coat of an intern in Mount Zion Hospital.

During my long road trip, with snatched meals here and there, I had lost weight, but I had also worked out when possible at gyms, so I was in trim shape, under two hundred pounds, when I showed off my new bike and my new body in New York in June. But when I returned to San Francisco, I decided to “bulk up” (as weight lifters say) and have a go at a weight- lifting record, one which I thought might be just within my reach. Putting on weight was particularly easy to do at Mount Zion, because its coffee shop offered double cheeseburgers and huge milk shakes, and these were free to residents and interns. Rationing myself to five double cheeseburgers and half a dozen milkshakes per evening and training hard, I bulked up swiftly, moving from the mid-heavy category (up to 198 pounds) to the heavy (up to 240 pounds) to the superheavy (no limit). I told my parents about this—as I told them almost everything—and they were a bit disturbed, which surprised me, because my father was no lightweight and weighed around 250 himself.1

I had done some weight lifting as a medical student in London in the 1950s. I belonged to a Jewish sports club, the Maccabi, and we would have power-lifting contests with other sports clubs, the three competition lifts being the curl, the bench press, and the squat, or deep knee bend.

Very different from these were the three Olympic lifts— the press, the snatch, and the clean and jerk—and here we had world-class lifters in our little gym. One of them, Ben Helfgott, had captained the British weight-lifting team in the 1956 Olympic Games. He became a good friend (and even now, in his eighties, he is still extraordinarily strong and agile).2 I tried the Olympic lifts, but I was too clumsy. My snatches, in particular, were dangerous to those around me, and I was told in no uncertain terms to get off the Olympic lifting platform and go back to power lifting.

The Central YMCA in San Francisco had particularly good weight-lifting facilities. The first time I went there, my eye was caught by a bench-press bar loaded with nearly 400 pounds. No one at the Maccabi could bench-press anything like this, and when I looked around, I saw no one in the Y who looked up to such a weight. No one, at least, until a short but hugely broad and thick-chested man, a white-haired gorilla, hobbled into the gym—he was slightly bowlegged—lay down on the bench, and, by way of warmup, did a dozen easy reps with the bench-press bar. He added weights for subsequent sets, going to nearly 500 pounds. I had a Polaroid camera with me and took a picture as he rested between sets. I got talking to him later; he was very genial. He told me that his name was Karl Norberg, that he was Swedish, that he had worked all his life as a longshoreman, and that he was now seventy years old. His phenomenal strength had come to him naturally; his only exercise had been hefting boxes and barrels at the docks, often one on each shoulder, boxes and barrels which no “normal” person could even lift off the ground.

I felt inspired by Karl and determined to lift greater pound- ages myself, to work on the one lift I was already fairly good at—the squat. Training intensively, even obsessively, at a small gym in San Rafael, I worked up to doing five sets of five reps with 555 pounds every fifth day. The symmetry of this pleased me but caused amusement at the gym—“Sacks and his fives.” I didn’t realize how exceptional this was until another lifter encouraged me to have a go at the California squat record. I did so, diffidently, and to my delight was able to set a new record, a squat with a 600-pound bar on my shoulders. This was to serve as my introduction to the power-lifting world; a weight-lifting record is equivalent, in these circles, to publishing a scientific paper or a book in academia.

1. My father would eat continually in the presence of food but go all day without food if it was not available; it is similar with me. In the absence of internal controls, I have to have external ones. I have fixed routines for eating and dislike deviations from them.
2. Helfgott’s achievement was all the more extraordinary because he had survived the camps at Buchenwald and Theresienstadt.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00TUAYC7I
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Picador; Main Market Ed. edition (May 1, 2015)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ May 1, 2015
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 23.4 MB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 460 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #688,628 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #67 in Biographies of Social Scientists & Psychologists (Kindle Store)
- #295 in Psychologist Biographies
- #548 in Biographies of Medical Professionals (Kindle Store)

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Oliver Sacks

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Oliver Sacks was born in 1933 in London and was educated at Queen's College, Oxford. He completed his medical training at San Francisco's Mount Zion Hospital and at UCLA before moving to New York, where he soon encountered the patients whom he would write about in his book Awakenings.

Dr Sacks spent almost fifty years working as a neurologist and wrote many books, including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Musicophilia, and Hallucinations, about the strange neurological predicaments and conditions of his patients. The New York Times referred to him as 'the poet laureate of medicine', and over the years he received many awards, including honours from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Royal College of Physicians. In 2008, he was appointed Commander of the British Empire. His memoir, On the Move, was published shortly before his death in August 2015.

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Customers find the book engaging and enlightening. They describe the author as caring, thoughtful, and compassionate. The writing is described as well-written with beautiful prose. Readers appreciate the personal admissions and analysis. They praise the neurologist for his insightful clinical insights and scientific curiosity. Overall, they describe the biography as outstanding and a great work by a scholar of humanity.

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379 customers mention "Reading quality"376 positive3 negative

Customers find the book engaging and interesting. They describe the tone as fresh, honest, and enlightening. The memoir is described as genuine and not self-aggrandizing. Readers appreciate the author's inquisitive and compassionate nature.

"...one tale flows naturally into another, yet where there is a feeling of time passing from his years as a young man, to middle age and finally to old..." Read more

"...You’ll also find stories that make Sacks very human. Memoirs, real memoirs, are not works of self-aggrandisement...." Read more

"...poetry-appreciating young neurologist with a rebellious, inquisitive streak is satisfying because it shows who a neurologist can be -- an artist, a..." Read more

"Oliver Sacks has given us a wonderful book. Since there are already close to 50 high praising reviews, there is little which I can add to these...." Read more

134 customers mention "Inspiration"134 positive0 negative

Customers find the book inspiring. They describe the author as a thoughtful, compassionate individual with an extraordinary capacity of empathy and desire to relieve suffering. The memoir is poignant and powerful, with stories that make Sacks very human. Readers also mention that the author is a perceptive observer of his own mind, body, and people.

"...There is a wry sense of humour throughout and many poignant moments; the most poignant, perhaps, that about finding love...." Read more

"...You’ll also find stories that make Sacks very human. Memoirs, real memoirs, are not works of self-aggrandisement...." Read more

"A poignant, powerful memoir of Sacks' life and the line between the humanities and the sciences that he so elegantly balanced his life's work upon...." Read more

"...of a truly unique and fascinating man who has the capacity to treat patients lovingly and still keep a scientific handle on all details...." Read more

132 customers mention "Writer quality"113 positive19 negative

Customers find the book well-written and enjoyable. They appreciate the author's writing style and the beautiful prose. The language flows smoothly compared to Sacks' earlier works.

"...His Wife For A Hat and I suspect that this is still the best known of his many books...." Read more

"...He has a style of writing that makes these complicated concepts understable for the average person (such as myself)...." Read more

"...He also writes eloquently and relatably about the intersection between neurology and psychiatry and the importance of realizing a holistic,..." Read more

"...film, ‘Awakenings’ is told with a fresh tale and the writing and making of them are exhausting. The term ‘heroic’ almost comes to mind...." Read more

126 customers mention "Storyteller"117 positive9 negative

Customers enjoy the author's storytelling style. They find the autobiography narrative engaging and insightful, providing an honest account of the life of an iconic figure. Readers appreciate the candid personal admissions and analysis. The book is described as a moving document that depicts the author's life with its ups and downs.

"...There has often been an autobiographical thread through his books; in one of my favourites, The Mind’s Eye, he is one of the cases—he describes his..." Read more

"...It is also, very much, a catalog of his relationships with a wide array of people, both in and out of the sciences...." Read more

"...hope his book inspires the artists to appreciate the beauty and subtlety of science, and the scientists to appreciate the emotion and abstraction of..." Read more

"...His book and film, ‘Awakenings’ is told with a fresh tale and the writing and making of them are exhausting. The term ‘heroic’ almost comes to mind...." Read more

86 customers mention "Neurologist"80 positive6 negative

Customers find the neurologist insightful and warm. They appreciate his clinical observations and scientific inquiry. The book includes details of his careers in neurology and writing, as well as descriptions of intimate patient experiences. Readers praise the author's gift for explaining complex scientific concepts in ways the lay reader can understand. They describe him as an unconventional doctor who thinks outside the box.

"...I learned much more about neural mapping, Tourette’s, encephalitis, disassociated limbs, and color blindness than I thought possible just by merely..." Read more

"...spent his life not dwelling on limitations of science but savoring scientific inquiry, by pursuing purpose and possibility...." Read more

"...has the capacity to treat patients lovingly and still keep a scientific handle on all details...." Read more

"...of the brain, thanks to his careful listening to and observing patients with brain diseases, as well as his special ability to transform these..." Read more

62 customers mention "Biography"62 positive0 negative

Customers find the biography an inspiring read about a gifted writer and physician. They describe the author as brilliant and fascinating, with an interesting personality and history. The memoir is poignant and powerful, with Sacks paying homage to his colleagues who have inspired him.

"A poignant, powerful memoir of Sacks' life and the line between the humanities and the sciences that he so elegantly balanced his life's work upon...." Read more

"...This memoir is a non-stop journey of a truly unique and fascinating man who has the capacity to treat patients lovingly and still keep a scientific..." Read more

"A gifted human being - not just doctor, or scientist, or writer, or diarist - recounts his many adventures and discoveries during his lifetime, in..." Read more

"...times and days, it is a true joy to read the stories and careers of profoundly good people, with an extraordinary capacity of empathy and desire to..." Read more

36 customers mention "Honesty"36 positive0 negative

Customers appreciate the author's honesty, sincerity, and candid autobiography. They find it engaging, with intimate details of his private life described. The author's empathy and respect for the truth are praised.

"...eighties he has no qualms about shocking his readers with his straight-forward honesty as he tells us about his sexual baptism in Amsterdam in 1955,..." Read more

"...tales of human adaptation that elicit his empathy and respect for the exact truth...." Read more

"...The tone is fresh, honest, engaging, not pretentious, as the narrative combines the author's insatiable scientific curiosity and his personal..." Read more

"...his careers in neurology, and writing as well as describing intimate details of his private life including characterizations of his family, close..." Read more

30 customers mention "Beauty"30 positive0 negative

Customers find the book engaging and descriptive. They appreciate its intimate look at a man's life, with vivid descriptions of his passions, pains, and neuroses. Readers praise Sacks as an interesting figure and a gift to his chosen field.

"...There is no question that he was strikingly handsome, and somewhat of an exhibitionist, as the cover of the book and photos inside..." Read more

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"...His prose is compelling, vivid, and persuasive...." Read more

"...He was a creative and unusual giant with unique insights and remarkable contributions, which the world took its time to acknowledge...." Read more

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Jenni Ogden
The Best Way To Go
Reviewed in the United States on September 8, 2015
Verified Purchase

I wrote this for my newsletter before Dr. Sacks died but didn't have the heart to put it on Amazon until now.

July 9th, 2015: As I write this, Oliver Sacks is celebrating his 82nd birthday. Almost five months ago, his readers, fans, patients and friends read, with heavy hearts, his New York Times essay My Own Life: Oliver Sacks on learning he has terminal cancer. I was one of numerous thousands who felt a very personal sadness that this lovely man had not only been going through a tough time, but had more hard times ahead. Somewhat selfishly—also like thousands of others—I felt bereft as I looked at my shelf of Oliver Sacks books and realised that there would be only one more.

But what a one. Dr. Sacks’ autobiography, On The Move: A Life, published just two months after his moving tribute to life and death, is a triumph. The cover shows Marlon Brando in leathers astride a motorbike—who knows, perhaps Brando had been a patient or friend of the unconventional Dr. Sacks? No, of course it was Oliver himself in his younger years when his greatest passion was motorbikes. As a young neurology resident in Los Angeles he would take off on his bike on Friday when he had finished at the hospital and ride 500 miles in a straight line along Route 66 to the Grand Canyon, arriving with the sunrise. There he would hike in the Canyon before riding back to LA on Sunday night, arriving in time to appear “bright and fresh” for neurology rounds on Monday morning. Around the same time he was a weightlifter of some note, in the heavyweight class. He also swam enormous distances in the sea, and loved scuba diving, photography, botany, natural history, music and poetry.

The first book of his that I read was The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat and I suspect that this is still the best known of his many books. I had recently completed my PhD in clinical neuropsychology, and had already decided that what I wanted to do more than any other sort of research was to seek out and study single cases, so reading this when it was first published in 1985 was a wonderful confirmation of my decision—especially as large group studies were (and still are) considered more respectable and “scientific”. In fact Sacks’ first book was Migraine, which he wrote in a period of days in 1967 and then struggled to publish, primarily because of the efforts to prevent it being published by the jealous head of the Migraine Clinic Sacks had been working in.

This is just one of the stories that populate On The Move which is written almost as separate stories, where one tale flows naturally into another, yet where there is a feeling of time passing from his years as a young man, to middle age and finally to old age. In this sense it is almost as if he is observing himself as he does his patients. There has often been an autobiographical thread through his books; in one of my favourites, The Mind’s Eye, he is one of the cases—he describes his own lifelong problem with recognising faces, and later his terrible loss of depth vision when he loses the sight in one eye. Then of course there is A Leg To Stand On, which draws on his own hallucinatory experiences after an accident when the muscles of his leg were badly damaged, Hallucinations, inspired by his own hallucinatory drug-fuelled experiences, and his memoir of his childhood, Uncle Tungsten. In On The Move he comments: “It seems to me that I discover my thoughts through the act of writing, in the act of writing”, and this certainly encapsulates what he achieves in his books . Yet he has never revealed the private Sacks until now, in On The Move. Perhaps it is only as he stands (on both legs) looking back and reviews his long and eventful-rich life that he sees these deeply personal and vivid memories as core to this final story.

In his eighties he has no qualms about shocking his readers with his straight-forward honesty as he tells us about his sexual baptism in Amsterdam in 1955, and his introduction to the gay lifestyle. Candid observations of his drug addiction, sultry love affairs and unrequited desires for beautiful young men at one end of the spectrum, and 50 years of psychoanalysis with the same therapist at the other, are all here. His close relationships with his doctor parents, his aunts and uncles, and his disabled brother, each of whom contributed to the gentle, curious, shy, eccentric, deeply thoughtful man he became; his friendships with many famous people including W.H. Auden, Francis Crick, Stephen Jay Gould, and Carol Burnett—none because they were famous but all because their minds and personalities clicked with his—; his reliance on Kate Edgar, the amazing woman who for 30 years has been his personal assistant, editor, collaborator and friend; the enduring doctor-patient relationships he formed with his patients; the stories behind his books and the Awakenings movie: all are captured here in this engaging story of his life.

There is a wry sense of humour throughout and many poignant moments; the most poignant, perhaps, that about finding love. Halfway through the book he tells us about a wild week of drug-fuelled sex he had with a delicious young stud he met on his 40th birthday—“the perfect birthday present….parting without pain or promises when our week was up.” But then he notes “It was just as well that I had no foreknowledge of the future, for after that sweet birthday fling I was to have no sex for the next thirty-five years.”

Not until the end of the book do we learn that in 2008 when he was 75 he met Billy Hayes, also a writer, and two years later they discovered they were deeply in love. He observes “It has sometimes seemed to me that I have lived at a certain distance from life. This changed when Billy and I fell in love… now (for God’s sake!) I was in my seventy-seventh year.”

As I closed the book I was left with the feeling that in these final months—many more I hope—Oliver Sacks has reached a truly happy place. And from this reader, what more is there to say than thank you Dr. Sacks.

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Review of On the Move by Oliver Sacks
Reviewed in the United States on February 11, 2016
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I must admit that before seeing that NPR’s Science Friday had a book club and that the inaugural selection was On the Move, I had no idea who Oliver Sacks is. Working in the public library, I had seen Musicophilia come in a while back and its subject immediately piqued my curiosity. I was working on several other things at the time and so added it to my “To Read” list on Goodreads. Knowing a bit more about the eminent Mr. Sacks now it appears that there will be several other books I will have to add to the list.

What I find most striking about Sacks is not his vast knowledge of neurology and a myriad of other subjects but his eye for people. He seems to me, to be one of those individuals who can see right into a person without losing his sense of the entire being. Medical science could use a few more like him.

The book is not only a list of the events Sacks has witnessed, which span World War II to California culture in the 60s to the 21st century in New York. It is also, very much, a catalog of his relationships with a wide array of people, both in and out of the sciences.

You’ll also find stories that make Sacks very human. Memoirs, real memoirs, are not works of self-aggrandisement. Sacks’ willingness to show less than dignifying moments makes him more accessible. For example, he relays a couple of examples of road rage from his early days as a motorcycle enthusiast. He chased down a vehicle that had almost knocked him off the road only to realize that it was just a bunch of scared kids. This brought to mind a similar incident I experienced. I once got so angry at someone on the road that I attempted to throw a large tea out the car window at another driver. Fortunately for both of us, the window was closed. The other driver got away without injury and I decided that I would no longer listen to heavy metal while driving and that road rage was stupid.

He spoke of experimenting with drugs in the 60s and 70s and how, one time, he experienced a completely auditory hallucination. What was striking about it was that it took the form of a very mundane conversation with a pair of neighbors he thought were in his living room (he was in the kitchen preparing lunch). When he emerged he discovered no-one was there. For me, I had to have my neck rebuilt in the mid-90s. I was given morphine for the pain. I fell asleep while reading and dreamt, rather vividly, that I had read the entire book. When I awoke I found I was really only about 100 pages in. It was the most boring dream I have ever had.

There is a lot about the endless number of subjects which have fascinated Sacks throughout his life. He has a style of writing that makes these complicated concepts understable for the average person (such as myself). I learned much more about neural mapping, Tourette’s, encephalitis, disassociated limbs, and color blindness than I thought possible just by merely touching on the subjects.

All in all, Sacks has experienced an amazing life and it shines through in his writing. The moral of the story, however seems to be that it is a grave mistake to ignore signs such as “Beware of Bull.” If you haven’t read it, McCarthy’s Bar by Pete McCarthy has a very funny example of the consequences of ignoring a similar sign. Sacks’ own bull incident does not end with a snicker. It just amazes me that both men see the sign, comprehend what it means, and choose to think it a joke. Anyway, read the book and stay away from bulls!

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Rikkie
Brilliant
Reviewed in Canada on October 21, 2020
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This is author on whos work was created the film "Awakenings". This, though, is only a small portion of the life's work of a brilliant mind and a sensitive soul. One of those books you want to read over and over again, it's direct generosity draws me in every time. Don't miss this one.

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Miriam
A charming man who lived his life at the fullest
Reviewed in Italy on June 16, 2019
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The life of a genius seen through the eyes of the genius himself. A life lived at the fullest.
Oliver Sacks was a very curious, empathic, witty, extremely cultured man, always eager to learn new skills and open to new experiences whenever he had the chance, in a word, a life enthusiast.
I certainly could have imagined what kind of man he was by reading his other books and essays, however it's the autobiography I'd recommend above the others, it is such a compelling reading.

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sehr empfehlenswert
Reviewed in Germany on October 7, 2017
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Oliver Sacks beschreibt in einer entwaffnenden Offenheit den Verlauf seines beruflichen und privaten Lebens, wobei diese Verläufe bei einem Mediziner mit einer solch hohen Empathiefähigkeit für seine Patienten sehr oft starke Parallelen aufweisen. In der gewohnten Art werden einzelne Patienten, Ihre Erkrankungen und die Bedeutung dieser Erkrankung für das Umfeld medizinisch aber gleichzeitig sehr einfühlend beschrieben.
Mit Olivier Sacks hat die Neurologie meiner Meinung nach im letzten Jahr einen gossen Menschen verloren.

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Cliente Amazon
Un muy buen libro y una buena edición
Reviewed in Spain on October 15, 2016
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Un gran libro a todo el que le guste Oliver Sacks, leer su autobiografía te ayuda a entender cómo este gran hombre se construyó a sí mismo, y cómo desarrolló una visión tan rica acerca del ser humano.

En cuanto a la edición se trata de un libro de bolsillo, muy cómodo; una edición bonita.

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Luiz E. Pellanda
Mais do que autobiografia
Reviewed in Brazil on May 24, 2015
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Trata-se de uma verdadeira transcrição de sua própria auto-análise, seus sentimentos como primeiro plano para a descrição dos acontecimentos que lhe foram significativos. Essencial para cada um repensar sua própria trajetória de vida. Comovente.

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The Best Way To Go

Review of On the Move by Oliver Sacks

Brilliant

A charming man who lived his life at the fullest

sehr empfehlenswert

Un muy buen libro y una buena edición

Mais do que autobiografia