Letters

Praise

“Here is the unedited Oliver Sacks—struggling, passionate, a furiously intelligent misfit. And also endless interesting. He was a man like no other.” —Atul Gawande, author of Being Mortal

“Edgar—the longtime assistant, editor, and researcher for Sacks (1933–2015)—provides an intimate window into the neurologist’s personal and professional lives in this expansive collection of his correspondence. Sacks’s trademark lyricism is evident throughout. . . . What emerges is a pointillistic portrait of an incredible intellect with all-too-human frailties and an insatiable curiosity about the human condition. This is an essential resource for understanding Sacks.” —Publishers Weekly

“Very enjoyable. . . . A lifetime of correspondence adds new dimensions to a brilliant mind’s oeuvre.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Oliver Sacks’s letters are superb—fluent, brilliant, candid, intimate—and some of them are deliriously passionate. Oliver could write a multi-page love letter as well as a lengthy analysis of a drug state or a neurological condition. Taken together, over more than fifty years, they constitute an autobiography in epistolary form.” —Paul Theroux, author of The Mosquito Coast and Burma Sahib

“Here is Oliver Sacks annealed. All his largehearted curiosity, all his childlike wonder at how everything coheres, all the self-doubt trembling beneath his brilliance, come alive on these pages. One is left magnified just by bearing witness to this vast and solitary mind, searching for connection and discovering himself.” —Maria Popova, author of Figuring

“Be prepared to discover a world of human treasures in the letters of Oliver Sacks. Sacks wrote copiously to family and friends, as expected, but he also wrote abundantly to several colleagues in the universe of biology, neuroscience and psychology, during a seminal period (which includes the last two decades of the twentieth century and the first two decades of the twenty-first). One marvel here is that Sacks’ literary genius manages to reveal both sides of a conversation, although we are only made privy to his perspective on the issues.” —Antonio Damasio, author of Feeling and Knowing