oliver sacks everything in its place review

The New York Times had referred to Sacks as the “poet laureate of medicine”, and carried an obituary that said that neurological conditions were for him occasions “for eloquent meditations on consciousness and the human condition”. A melanoma of the eye, diagnosed nine years earlier, had recurred and metastasised to his liver. I was just starting out in medicine, and it was a relief to see how a lifetime in clinical practice offered insights still relevant across the sciences. As the only practising clinician, Sacks made perceptive and valuable contributions – and was clearly having fun. The participants’ areas of expertise were diverse: biology, physics, palaeontology, neuroscience, philosophy. The series, A Glorious Accident, didn’t seem to have invited any women to take part but even so I watched it to the end – three hours later. It was snowing outside, and Helsinki seemed suddenly less inviting I sat down on the bed and began to watch.Ī Dutch TV company had assembled these men, together with Freeman Dyson, Stephen Toulmin and Rupert Sheldrake, for the round-table finale of a documentary series on science and the meaning of life. Then another, Stephen Jay Gould, and another, Daniel Dennett. To my surprise, all were speaking English, then a face I knew filled the screen – it was Oliver Sacks. A darkened room with a dining table came into focus, and around it were six people having a conversation. I dropped my bag on the floor and, wondering what Finnish daytime television was like, switched on the TV. Everything in Its Place gives us an intimate portrait of a master writer and thinker at work.One March in the mid 1990s I checked into a cheap hotel in Helsinki.

In counterpoint to these elegant investigations of what makes us human, this volume also includes pieces that celebrate Sacks’s love of the natural world – and his last meditations on life in the twenty-first century.

In several of the compassionate case histories collected here, Sacks considers for the first time the enigmas of depression, psychosis, and schizophrenia, and in others he returns to conditions that have long fascinated him: Tourette’s syndrome, ageing, dementia, and hallucinations. Why do humans need gardens? How, and when, does a physician tell his patient she has Alzheimer's? What is social media doing to our brains? In this spirited volume, Oliver Sacks examines the many passions of his own life – both as a doctor engaged with the central questions of human existence, and as a polymath conversant in all the sciences. From the bestselling author of On Gratitude and On the Move.

Oliver sacks everything in its place review