Everything in Its Place

A remarkable celebration of Sacks's varied interests, told with his characteristic compassion and erudition, and in his luminous prose.

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.

Vorwort
A remarkable celebration of Sacks's varied interests, told with his characteristic compassion and erudition, and in his luminous prose.

Autorentext

Oliver Sacks was born in 1933 in London and was educated at Queen's College, Oxford. He completed his medical training at San Francisco's Mount Zion Hospital and at UCLA before moving to New York, where he soon encountered the patients whom he would write about in his book Awakenings.

Dr Sacks spent almost fifty years working as a neurologist and wrote many books, including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Musicophilia, and Hallucinations, about the strange neurological predicaments and conditions of his patients. The New York Times referred to him as 'the poet laureate of medicine', and over the years he received many awards, including honours from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Royal College of Physicians. In 2008, he was appointed Commander of the British Empire. His memoir, On the Move, was published shortly before his death in August 2015.

Klappentext

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. 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 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. 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. Everything in Its Place gives us an intimate portrait of a master writer and thinker at work.

'Extraordinarily touching . . . Our best chance for the future, we may feel, is that there may be others among us like this uncommon, passionate, and enlightened man'
New York Review of Books

'Everything in Its Place is a wondrous read in its entirety, irradiating Sacks's kaleidoscopic curiosity across subjects'
Maria Popova, Brain Pickings