Aug 30 2015
British neurologist and author Oliver Sacks has died at the age of 82 in New York.
Dr Sacks earned a medical degree at Queen's College, Oxford University, and later began working as a consulting neurologist for Beth Abraham Hospital, in the Bronx, New York, in 1966. While there he encountered patients who had spent decades in frozen states, unable to initiate movement. He recognised the patients as survivors of a pandemic of sleepy sickness that had swept the world from 1916 to 1927, and treated them with a then-experimental drug, L-dopa, which enabled them to regain consciousness. His book about the patients, Awakenings, inspired an Oscar nominated film of the same name and a play by Harold Pinter, A Kind of Alaska.
In The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars he described patients struggling to live with conditions ranging from Tourette's syndrome to autism, epilepsy, phantom limb syndrome, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer's.
He also investigated the world of deaf people and sign language in Seeing Voices, and a rare community of color-blind people in The Island of the Colorblind.
The House on Biscayne Bay
by Chanel Cleeton
As death stalks a gothic mansion in Miami, the lives of two women intertwine as the past and present collide.
The Flower Sisters
by Michelle Collins Anderson
From the new Fannie Flagg of the Ozarks, a richly-woven story of family, forgiveness, and reinvention.
The Funeral Cryer by Wenyan Lu
Debut novelist Wenyan Lu brings us this witty yet profound story about one woman's midlife reawakening in contemporary rural China.
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
