A deeply moving testimony and celebration of how to embrace life.In January 2015, Oliver Sacks was diagnosed with a recurrence of cancer, and he shared this news in a New York Times essay that inspired readers all over the world: "I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude.... Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure."

In his most beloved and extraordinary book, Dr. Sacks recounts the case histories of patients inhabiting the compelling world of neurological disorders. Featuring a preface never before included.Oliver Sacks's The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat tells the stories of individuals afflicted with perceptual and intellectual disorders: patients who have lost their memories and with them the greater part of their pasts; who are no longer able to recognize peo...

An impassioned, tender, and joyous memoir by the author of Musicophilia and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.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 ...

A profoundly fascinating, illuminating major work from the beloved, bestselling thinker and neurologist Oliver Sacks--completed by him just before his death--provides readers with a compelling, rare gift from the master.The River of Consciousness reflects Oliver Sacks at his wisest and most humane, as he examines some of the human animal's most remarkable faculties: memory, creativity, consciousness, and our present, ongoing evolution.Before his dea...

From the distinguished neurologist who is also one of the most remarkable storytellers of our time — an account of his youth, as unexpected and fascinating as his celebrated case histories.What first aroused Sacks’ boundless curiosity?In this wonderful memoir, he evokes, with warmth and wit, his childhood in wartime England. There was the large, scientifically minded family in which his very early fascination with meals was nurtured – particularly by “Uncle Tungsten.” There...

What goes on in human beings when they make or listen to music? What is it about music, what gives it such peculiar power over us, power delectable and beneficent for the most part, but also capable of uncontrollable and sometimes destructive force? Music has no concepts, it lacks images; it has no power of representation, it has no relation to the world. And yet it is evident in all of us–we tap our feet, we keep time, hum, sing, conduct music, mirror the melodic contours and feelings of ...

From the author of the #1 national bestselling Musicophilia comes a truly visionary book: an exploration of the remarkable, unpredictable ways that our brains cope with the loss of sight by finding new forms of perception to create worlds as complete and rich as the no-longer-visible world.Following the phenomenal success of his international bestseller Musicophilia, the inimitable Oliver Sacks returns with another book on the extraordinary interac...

Hallucinations, for most people, imply madness. But there are many different types of non-psychotic hallucination caused by various illnesses or injuries, by intoxication--even, for many people, by falling sleep. From the elementary geometrical shapes that we see when we rub our eyes to the complex swirls and blind spots and zigzags of a visual migraine, hallucination takes many forms. At a higher level, hallucinations associated with the altered states of consciousness that may come with ...

"I have been an inveterate keeper of journals since I was 14 especially at times of adventure and crisis and travel. Here, for the first time, such a journal made its way to publication, not that much changed from the raw, handwritten journal that I kept during my fascinated 9 days in Oaxaca." Dr. Oliver SacksOliver Sacks is best known as an explorer of the human mind, a neurologist with a gift for the complex, insightful portrayals of people and their conditions that fuel the phen...

Awakenings — which inspired the major motion picture — is the remarkable story of a group of patients who contracted sleeping-sickness during the great epidemic just after World War I. Frozen for decades in a trance-like state, these men and women were given up as hopeless until 1969, when Dr. Oliver Sacks gave them the then-new drug L-DOPA, which had an astonishing, explosive, "awakening" effect. Dr. Sacks recounts the moving case histories of his patients, their lives, a...

From the bestselling author of Gratitude and On the Move, a final volume of essays that showcases Sacks's broad range of interests--from his passions for ferns, swimming, and horsetails, to his final case histories exploring schizophrenia, dementia, and Alzheimer's.Oliver Sacks, renowned scientist and storyteller, is adored by readers for his neurological case histories, his fascination and familiarity with human behaviour at its most unexpected a...

**A New Yorker Best Book of 2024The letters of one of the greatest observers of the human species, revealing his passion for life and work, friendship and art, medicine and society, and the richness of his relationships with friends, family, and fellow intellectuals over the decades, collected here for the first time.“Here is the unedited Oliver Sacks—struggling, passionate, a furiously intelligent misfit. And also endless interesting. He was a man like no other.” ...