Awakenings [Paperback]

Oliver Sacks (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0375704051 | ISBN-13: 978-0375704055 | Publication Date: October 5, 1999

Awakenings--which inspired the major motion picture--is the remarkable story of a group of patients who contracted sleeping-sickness during the great epidemic just after World War I. Frozen for decades in a trance-like state, these men and women were given up as hopeless until 1969, when Dr. Oliver Sacks gave them the then-new drug L-DOPA, which had an astonishing, explosive, "awakening" effect. Dr. Sacks recounts the moving case histories of his patients, their lives, and the extraordinary transformations which went with their reintroduction to a changed world.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

It hardly seems fair that so many great doctors are also great writers. Perhaps it's qualities like sensitivity, craft, and dedication that keep physicians like Oliver Sacks in hospitals all day and at writing desks all night; if nothing else, these qualities shine in books like Awakenings. This powerful set of case histories rises above its pathological foundation to find new literary territory, a medical-spiritual synthesis equally stimulating for the mind and the soul. It's no wonder Hollywood producers chose to turn it into a feature film--anyone can see the universal human struggle against bondage and despair in these pages.

The sleeping-sickness epidemic of 1918 caused hundreds of survivors to slip into a bizarre rigid paralysis with similarities to advanced Parkinson's disease. These patients, only occasionally able to communicate or move, were nearly all institutionalized for life, their ranks increasing every now and then with similarly afflicted men and women. Sacks came to work at a long-term care facility shortly before the first exciting results with L-dopa and Parkinson's in the late 1960s; his patients soon embarked on dramatic, difficult recoveries from up to 50 years of torpor. He documents their spiritual and medical obstacles with great care to portray their individual personalities, long suppressed but finally released. Though many great doctors are also great writers, few can compare with Oliver Sacks for expressing the relation of medicine to the human spirit. --Rob Lightner

Review

"One of the most beautifully composed and moving works of our time." —The Washington Post

"Compulsively readable. . . . Dr. Sacks writes beautifully and with exceptional subtlety and penetration into both the state of mind of his patients and the nature of illness generally. . . . A brilliant and humane book." —A. Alvarez, The Observer

"[Sacks] opens to the reader doors of perception generally passed through only by those at the far borders of human experience." —The Boston Globe

"A masterpiece." —W. H. Auden --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 464 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (October 5, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375704051
• ISBN-13: 978-0375704055
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.9 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #52,624 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #8 in Books > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Aging > Parkinson's Disease

More About the Author

Oliver Sacks was born in London and educated in London, Oxford, California, and New York. He is professor of neurology and psychiatry at Columbia University, and Columbia's first University Artist. He is the author of many books, including Awakenings, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and Musicophilia. His newest book, The Mind's Eye, will be published in October, 2010.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

54 of 55 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Medical Case histories as great art, December 30, 1999

By 

"jisom2" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Awakenings (Paperback)

Oliver Sacks has elevated the case history in Awakenings to a literary art form of the highest kind. A neurologist in charge of a ward of people left high and dry by the 1918 flu epidemic which left them in a profound catatonic state, an extreme form of Parkinson's, he experiments on his patients with a new wonder drug L-Dopa which proves a mixed blessing for them. Some are awakened to brilliant life for a brief time, but most of them are doomed either to revert to their original condition or to die (several know they are going to die and announce the fact). Dr. Sacks (who looks quite demonic on the cover photo) uses his medical powers to change lives with a high-handedness that is almost Faustian. The effects are so extraordinary and strange that some of these stories read like the finest fantasy. All the stories are wonderfully strange, proving that human consciousness is many-faceted and that what we label "disease" may be merely a new avenue of perception. Some of these people perform acts not only bizarre but improbable, showing an unusual level of vitality and no ordinary degree of power. There are people here able to fill whole buckets with their saliva, people who rise from beds they have not left for 30 years with no muscle atrophy, people whose extraperception provide them with a life invisible to others, people who fall into pits unseen by anyone else in a perfectly ordinary hospital hall, unless securely in contact with others, people who can only move "normally" to music, people occupying a strange anachronistic limbo, stuck in the time when they first fell ill, and people who move as slowly as plants grow, whose time sense is distorted so that they seem motionless as statues for hours of a time arrested in mid-movement, though in their own perception, they are completing an activity (brushing their hair) at an ordinary pace. This is Sack's greatest work, a riveting portrait of human possibilities at their most extreme.

33 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Wonderfully written, but less than that of his other work..., July 28, 2002

By 

S. Hung (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Awakenings (Paperback)

If I had never read "The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat" before this book (both by the same author), I would have rated this as a five-star classic. Though as well written as the other work, this book presents his studies in a less humane, and more scientific way. Read the other work and one will sense the noticeable difference in the way that Dr. Sacks approached his patients. When reading the "Awakenings", I felt as a detached bystander looking through the windows of his clinic and observing the patients. When reading "The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat", I was so engaged by Dr. Sacks vivid descriptions of the patients, physically, intellectually, emotionally and spiritually, that it was as if I was face-to-face with the patients, and that I was connected in some intrinsic way to each and every one of them. Please please read the other work as well as this one.

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Despite flaws, one of the most human books I've read, January 17, 2007

By 

Frikle - See all my reviews

This review is from: Awakenings (Paperback)

Despite flaws, one of the most human books I've read

In 1969, Oliver Sacks gave L-DOPA (a recently released "miracle drug") to scores of his post-encephalitic Parkinson's patients. Most of them woke up - after essentially being in a state of sleep/death for over 30 years. They were the remnants of the great post-WWI epidemic and most spent virtually all their adult lives institutionalised. They were suffering from a specific "flavour" of Parkinsonism - and contrary to popular belief, this disease is not about shaking or tremors but more about the warping of an internal sense of scale (of space and time) which makes movement, thought and being human almost impossible. L-DOPA gave the patients a new lease on life, but at a terrible price.

The book chiefly outlines the case histories of individual patients in the course of the treatment. Although occasionally Sacks is repetitive from one patient to another (one of the book's flaws), his attention to detail, his degree of empathy and the vividness with which he describes the patients and their lives are breathtaking. The book gives an amazing impression of what it's like to go from being at a standstill (your mind being taken up by a map of a map of a map of a map...of nothing) to the frenzy of mania (one patient spoke at 500 words a minute).

Awakenings has inspired a Hollywood movie, dozens of plays, documentaries, theatrical productions and more. This is because the story is about so much more than a particular disease. It's about what it means to be human. And it's about the tremendous strength of the patients in the face of a disease that has to be read about to be believed - literally a living hell. Although Sacks seems almost mystical-dualist at times (the other main flaw in my opinion), his purpose is to bring the story to the world and to encourage a more wholistic, empathetic medicine that does not aim to reduce the human to symptoms and side effects, especially when it's completely counterproductive for certain disorders.

Very recommended despite some minor flaws.