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Best Books of the Year So Far
Looking for something great to read? Browse our editors' picks for 2015's Best Books of the Year So Far in fiction, nonfiction, mysteries, children's books, and much more.
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Best Books of the Month
Want to know our Editors' picks for the best books of the month? Browse Best Books of the Month, featuring our favorite new books in more than a dozen categories.
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. However, while keeping this a "5 Star" book in my estimation, I shall point out some areas that it could have been better.
Sacks describes a seminal incident in his life in which he informed his farther that he is gay, and asks for this not to be disclosed to Oliver's mother.Nonetheless, the father does inform "Ma" about this, and the next morning she wakes up the 19 year old Oliver to inform him that he is an "abomination", quoting Leviticus and her orthodox Jewish teaching. Sacks is initially sexually undeterred by this, and lustily pursues gay sexual relations(hips) in his native England, Amsterdam, and then in the United States to which he emigrated, seemingly as a sexual refugee where he felt more freedom away from his wealthy, professional, successful, straight family. Sacks describes a life that seems to support several stereotypes embodied in the Village People: the motorcyclist, power-weight-lifter, resident of the San Francisco YMCA, etc. There is no question that he was strikingly handsome, and somewhat of an exhibitionist, as the cover of the book and photos inside (excellent and interesting) testify. He becomes a serious drug addict, and does not explain exactly how he went clean, except to indicate that he began intensive psychotherapy, which he continued for 50 years !Read more ›
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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful
Readers whose mental image of neurologist and prolific author Oliver Sacks is defined by his avuncular, white-bearded visage may be puzzled, at first, by the photograph of the buff, leather-jacketed young man astride a motorcycle that graces the cover of his memoir, ON THE MOVE. If they are, it should only take a few pages of this engrossing autobiography to understand why that image captures perfectly the spirit of his peripatetic and relentlessly curious life.
Considering that both of his parents and two older brothers were physicians, it's hardly surprising that Sacks gave little thought to any career other than medicine. Almost from the beginning, that career, most of which he pursued in the United States after leaving his native England for Canada in 1960, was driven as much by the storytelling impulse as it was by an affinity for science. Admitting his frustration at the tunnel vision of his residency training at UCLA in the 1960s, because "I think in narrative and historical terms," Sacks soon abandoned the laboratory for clinical practice.
Sacks ties his account of the highs and lows of that practice to many of his 12 previous books, including AWAKENINGS, the story of the transformation of postencephalitic patients treated with L-dopa that was made into the movie starring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro, and THE MAN WHO MISTOOK HIS WIFE FOR A HAT (the 1985 book that brought him to prominence). Though he's never bitter in describing it, Sacks understands that his professional recognition has not matched the regard in which he's held as a popularizer of knowledge about disorders as diverse as Tourette's syndrome and color blindness.Read more ›
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67 of 71 people found the following review helpful
Oliver Sacks is one of the most important thinkers of our time. His prior works have offered considerable insight about and needed compassion toward the immensely broad spectrum of the human condition: from memory loss and divergent modes of mental processing to profound sensory limitations. Above all, he has enabled us to walk in others' shoes and imagine perceiving the world from a wholly different perspective. Not only is he a compassionate and thorough physician, he is also an extraordinary writer. His prose is compelling, vivid, and persuasive. Yet in his intellectual discourse, it is easy to focus on his mind and think of him as purely a thinker, rather than as a complete person. On the Move, a brilliant autobiography, sheds considerable insight into the rest of his life, showing his 'human' side, including passions, strengths and weaknesses. It is a fascinating chronicle of a young man who discovers his sexual orientation during a very prejudiced age, who struggles with a drinking problem, who values the life of the body (working out) as well as the mind, and who loves roaming free, whether on his motorcycle, running or scuba diving. At last, the error in the film Awakenings, in which the character supposed to be Sacks is shown as timid and barely attuned to life, is corrected. Sacks is certainly not timid, and despite medical challenges, has shown himself to be very much full of life. It is society that has been too timid, and at long last needs to embrace diversity.
Paul Halpern, author of Einstein's Dice and Schrödinger's Cat: How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics
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