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Summary
Summary
From the best-selling author of Gratitude and On the Move, a final volume of essays that showcase Sacks's broad range of interests--from his passion for ferns, swimming, and horsetails, to his final case histories exploring schizophrenia, dementia, and Alzheimer's.
Oliver Sacks, scientist and storyteller, is beloved by readers for his neurological case histories and his fascination and familiarity with human behavior at its most unexpected and unfamiliar. Everything in Its Place is a celebration of Sacks's myriad interests, told with his characteristic compassion and erudition, and in his luminous prose.
Author Notes
Dr. Oliver Sacks spent more than fifty years working as a neurologist and writing books about the neurological predicaments and conditions of his patients, including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat , Musicophilia , and Hallucinations . The New York Times referred to him as "the poet laureate of medicine," and over the years, he received many awards, including honors from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Royal College of Physicians. His memoir, On the Move , was published shortly before his death in August 2015.
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this lovely collection of previously unpublished essays, the late, celebrated author and neurologist Sacks (The River of Consciousness) muses on his career, his youth, the mental health field, and much more. Readers will learn of influences that molded Sacks's brilliant mind, from the cephalopod specimens at the Natural History Museum in London to the "visionary, mystical" 19th-century scientist Humphry Davy, whom Sacks dubs the "Poet of Chemistry." Of the many remarkable essays on medical conditions, "Travels with Lowell" stands out for its sensitivity and nuance, as Sacks travels the world alongside a photographer with Tourette's, interviewing others with the condition, including one man who could trace incidents of the syndrome back six generations in his family, yet was not officially diagnosed until age 38. Sacks also recalls being consulted in the case of actor/writer Spalding Gray, who became desperately, compulsively depressed after a brain injury in 2001 and died by suicide three years later. Sacks's gentle, ruminative voice is a salve when investigating difficult subject matter, but there are plenty of lighter moments as well, as in a brief discussion of a topic dear to his heart-New York City's many and varied streetlamps. Piercingly insightful and delightfully strange, Sacks's final collection is a treat for the chronically curious. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Library Journal Review
This eclectic and satisfying collection of essays spans myriad topics: childhood remembrances, case histories, travelog, as well as explorations of various subjects that piqued the late neurologist Sacks's interest over his lifetime. Thirty-four pieces are included, some of which are published here for the first time (dates and location of earlier publications are noted in the sources and acknowledgements). Reading about Sacks's love of swimming, his lifelong fondness of gefilte fish, and his joy when browsing library stacks is as compelling as reading the more scientific essays chronicling various case histories, aging, and dementia. One noteworthy essay is the previously unpublished "Travels with Lowell," which recounts Sacks's friendship and travels with photojournalist Lowell Handler, who has Tourette's syndrome. In each informative and engaging selection, Sacks writes with his characteristic compassion and attention to detail. VERDICT Recommended primarily for fans of Sacks's earlier works. This final posthumous collection provides one last peek into the author's generous, curious, and brilliant mind. [See Prepub Alert, 10/15/18.]-Ragan O'Malley, Saint Ann's School, Brooklyn © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Water Babies We were all water babies, my three brothers and I. Our father, who was a swimming champ (he won the fifteen-mile race off the Isle of Wight three years in succession) and loved swimming more than anything else, introduced each of us to the water when we were scarcely a week old. Swimming is instinctive at this age, so, for better or worse, we never "learned" to swim. I was reminded of this when I visited the Caroline Islands, in Micronesia, where I saw even toddlers diving fearlessly into the lagoons and swimming, typically, with a sort of dog paddle. Everyone there swims, nobody is "unable" to swim, and the islanders' swimming skills are superb. Magellan and other navigators reaching Micronesia in the sixteenth century were astounded at such skills and, seeing the islanders swim and dive, bounding from wave to wave, could not help comparing them to dolphins. The children, in particular, were so at home in the water that they appeared, in the words of one explorer, "more like fish than human beings." (It was from the Pacific Islanders that, early in the twentieth century, we Westerners learned the crawl, the beautiful, powerful ocean stroke that they had perfected--so much better, so much more fitted to the human form than the froglike breaststroke chiefly used until that time.) For myself, I have no memory of being taught to swim; I learned my strokes, I think, by swimming with my father--though the slow, measured, mile-eating stroke he had (he was a powerful man who weighed nearly eighteen stone) was not entirely suited to a little boy. But I could see how my old man, huge and cumbersome on land, became transformed--graceful, like a porpoise--in the water; and I, self-conscious, nervous, and also rather clumsy, found the same delicious transformation in myself, found a new being, a new mode of being, in the water. I have a vivid memory of a summer holiday at the seaside in England the month after my fifth birthday, when I ran into my parents' room and tugged at the great whalelike bulk of my father. "Come on, Dad!" I said. "Let's come for a swim." He turned over slowly and opened one eye. "What do you mean, waking an old man of forty-three like this at six in the morning?" Now that my father is dead, and I am almost twice the age he was then, this memory of so long ago tugs at me, makes me equally want to laugh and cry. Adolescence was a bad time. I developed a strange skin disease: "erythema annulare centrifugum," said one expert; "erythema gyratum perstans," said another--fine, rolling, orotund words, but neither of the experts could do anything, and I was covered in weeping sores. Looking, or at least feeling, like a leper, I dared not strip at a beach or pool, and could only occasionally, if I was lucky, find a remote lake or tarn. At Oxford, my skin suddenly cleared, and the sense of relief was so intense that I wanted to swim nude, to feel the water streaming over every part of me without hindrance. Sometimes I would go swimming at Parson's Pleasure, a bend of the Cherwell, a preserve since the 1680s or earlier for nude bathing, and peopled, one felt, by the ghosts of Swinburne and Clough. On summer afternoons, I would take a punt on the Cherwell, find a secluded place to moor it, and then swim lazily for the rest of the day. Sometimes at night I would go for long runs on the towpath by the Isis, past Iffley Lock, far beyond the confines of the city. And then I would dive in and swim in the river, till it and I seemed to flow together, become one. Swimming became a dominant passion at Oxford, and after this there was no going back. When I came to New York, in the mid-1960s, I started to swim at Orchard Beach in the Bronx, and would sometimes make the circuit of City Island--a swim that took me several hours. This, indeed, is how I found the house I lived in for twenty years: I had stopped about halfway around to look at a charming gazebo by the water's edge, got out and strolled up the street, saw a little red house for sale, was shown round it (still dripping) by the puzzled owners, walked along to the real estate agent and convinced her of my interest (she was not used to customers in swim trunks), reentered the water on the other side of the island, and swam back to Orchard Beach, having acquired a house in midswim. I tended to swim outside--I was hardier then--from April through November, but would swim at the local Y in the winter. In 1976-77, I was named Top Distance Swimmer at the Mount Vernon Y, in Westchester: I swam five hundred lengths--six miles--in the contest and would have continued, but the judges said, "Enough! Please go home." One might think that five hundred lengths would be monotonous, boring, but I have never found swimming monotonous or boring. Swimming gave me a sort of joy, a sense of well-being so extreme that it became at times a sort of ecstasy. There was a total engagement in the act of swimming, in each stroke, and at the same time the mind could float free, become spellbound, in a state like a trance. I never knew anything so powerfully, so healthily euphoriant--and I was addicted to it, am still addicted, fretful when I cannot swim. Duns Scotus, in the thirteenth century, spoke of "condelectari sibi," the will finding delight in its own exercise; and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in our own time, speaks about "flow." There is an essential rightness about swimming, as about all such flowing and, so to speak, musical activities. And then there is the wonder of buoyancy, of being suspended in this thick, transparent medium that supports and embraces us. One can move in water, play with it, in a way that has no analogue in the air. One can explore its dynamics, its flow, this way and that; one can move one's hands like propellers or direct them like little rudders; one can become a little hydroplane or submarine, investigating the physics of flow with one's own body. And, beyond this, there is all the symbolism of swimming--its imaginative resonances, its mythic potentials. My father called swimming "the elixir of life," and certainly it seemed to be so for him: he swam daily, slowing down only slightly with time, until the grand age of ninety-four. I hope I can follow him, and swim till I die. Excerpted from Everything in Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales by Oliver Sacks All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
First Loves | |
Water Babies | p. 3 |
Remembering South Kensington | p. 7 |
First Love | p. 13 |
Humphry Davy: Poet of Chemistry | p. 19 |
Libraries | p. 40 |
A Journey Inside the Brain | p. 45 |
Clinical Tales | |
Cold Storage | p. 59 |
Neurological Dreams | p. 64 |
Nothingness | p. 71 |
Seeing God in the Third Millennium | p. 74 |
Hiccups and Other Curious Behaviors | p. 84 |
Travels with Lowell | p. 92 |
Urge | p. 108 |
The Catastrophe | p. 114 |
Dangerously Well | p. 129 |
Tea and Toast | p. 135 |
Telling | p. 139 |
The Aging Brain | p. 144 |
Kuru | p. 155 |
A Summer of Madness | p. 163 |
The Lost Virtues of the Asylum | p. 184 |
Life Continues | |
Anybody Out There? | p. 203 |
Clupeophilia | p. 211 |
Colorado Springs Revisited | p. 215 |
Botanists on Park | p. 219 |
Greetings from the Island of Stability | p. 224 |
Reading the Fine Print | p. 229 |
The Elephant's Gait | p. 234 |
Orangutan | p. 241 |
Why We Need Gardens | p. 243 |
Night of the Ginkgo | p. 248 |
Filter Fish | p. 250 |
Life Continues | p. 253 |
Bibliography | p. 259 |
Permissions and Acknowledgments | p. 265 |
Index | p. 269 |