Awakenings (Paperback)

~ (Author) "Miss D. was born in New York in 1904, the youngest and brightest of four children..." (more)
Key Phrases: kinematic vision, respiratory crises, postencephalitic patients, Mount Carmel, New York, Sir Thomas Browne (more...)

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

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: 7.9 x 5.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #23,598 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in these categories: (What's this?)

  #2 in	Books > Health, Mind & Body > Aging > Parkinson's Disease
  #43 in	Books > Professional & Technical > Medical > Medicine > Internal Medicine > Neurology
  #55 in	Books > Health, Mind & Body > Psychology & Counseling > Neuropsychology

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

34 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

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

By	"jisom2" (Richmond, CA USA) - See all my reviews

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.

21 of 22 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)

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.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Compelling documentation, May 3, 2004

By	anonymous_reader_of books - See all my reviews

One of the things I find most striking about Oliver Sacks is his humanity. I find myself instilled with his sense of compassion and understanding by reading his cases.

Awakenings succeeds at being accessible to both the layperson and professional, and captivating both. There is a glossary to familiarize yourself with neurological terminology, but again the book isn't overtly prolix; rather a gripping account of neurological maladies.

Through Mr.Sack's these patients have received a certain immortality; a sense that their suffering has not been in vain, but tremendously valuable, not only to the advancement of neurology but as testament to the inherent strength and resolve in us all.