A Biographical Memoir of Oliver Sacks
by Lawrence Weschler
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Published Aug 2019
400 pages
Genre: Biography/Memoir
Publication Information
The untold story of Dr. Oliver Sacks, his own most singular patient.
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.
"A thoroughly engaging and enchanting story." - Kirkus reviews (starred review)
"Sacks's many fans will love this entertaining portrait of a charismatic original." - Publishers Weekly
"This biographical memoir offers a window into the world Sacks inhabited—a world full of brilliance, insecurity, and a robust enthusiasm for life. Recommended for readers who wish they had had the privilege of knowing Sacks while he was alive." - Library Journal
This information about And How Are You, Dr. Sacks? was first featured
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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.
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