On the move : a life

by Oliver W. Sacks

Paper Book, 2015

Status

Available

Call number

B Sacks

Publication

New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2015.

Description

Biography & Autobiography. Medical. Science. Nonfiction. HTML: When Oliver Sacks was twelve years old, a perceptive schoolmaster wrote in his report: �??Sacks will go far, if he does not go too far.�?� It is now abundantly clear that Sacks has never stopped going. From its opening pages on his youthful obsession with motorcycles and speed, On the Move is infused with his restless energy. As he recounts his experiences as a young neurologist in the early 1960s, first in California, where he struggled with drug addiction, and then in New York, where he discovered a long-forgotten illness in the back wards of a chronic hospital, we see how his engagement with patients comes to define his life. With unbridled honesty and humor, Sacks shows us that the same energy that drives his physical passions�??weight lifting and swimming�??also drives his cerebral passions. He writes about his love affairs, both romantic and intellectual; his guilt over leaving his family to come to America; his bond with his schizophrenic brother; and the writers and scientists�??Thom Gunn, A. R. Luria, W. H. Auden, Gerald M. Edelman, Francis Crick�??who influenced him. On the Move is the story of a brilliantly unconventional physician and writer�??and of the man who has illuminated the many ways that the brain… (more)

Original publication date

2015

Media reviews

Accustomed to the contemporary obsession with “identity” (and sex for that matter), we might expect the autobiography of a gay man – especially one from a Jewish immigrant background who ends up emigrating to the US from Britain – to be preoccupied by differences of sexuality and heritage.
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But Sacks is a man of his generation, and while no prude, nor a jealous guard of his own privacy, nonetheless the personal and existential aspects of this autobiography are definitely secondary to the main business of his life, which has been the practice of neurology and the chronicling of the insights this practice has afforded.
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Barcode

1142
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