On The Move: A Life by Oliver Sacks
Ok, we all know about British neurologist, naturalist, historian of science, and author Oliver Sacks, compliments of the Robin Williams / Robert De Niro movie Awakenings and Sacks' most famous book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. I have also heard him interviewed on radio on various occasions and also heard a long interview after his death, with his partner Bill Hayes, on the occasion of the book launch for his own memoir Insomniac City.
The Book Grocer came good again, with the hardcopy of Sacks' autobiography On the Move: A Life on sale for $7 in August 2018. I snapped it up and read it over the next couple of weeks. Interestingly, the book was written in 2015, the same year that he died. Sacks never married and lived alone for most of his life. He declined to share personal details until late in his life. He addressed his homosexuality for the first time in this book.
I think this review by Petra X in Goodreads sums his life up well
Back in the 50s/60s in California he was Dr. Sacks, a neurologist all week, but a gay, leatherclad biker called Wolf at weekends. That is when he wasn't on Muscle Beach going in for weightlifting competitions!
Oliver Sacks great accomplishment to me was to show us the people of the cases he describes as quite separate from their disorders. Not schizophrenics, but people with schizophrenia, not autistics or even autistic people, but people with autism and all of them appreciated by Sacks as suffering from their symptoms but not, in any basic way, being them. One of Sacks' brothers had schizophrenia and needed care almost his entire life so Sacks knew mental as well as neurological disordered thinking and never confused the person with the problem.
Essentially, Sacks was as interested in the person as he was the disorder and never thought of his patients as just 'cases'. He treated his patients as co-researchers into their symptoms and gave them a new perspective, one that, as might be said, was healthier than thinking they were sick and needed to find a doctor to cure them.
I did enjoy the read, which showed a rather chaotic life, with family issues and all the other issues that make up our own lives. It was a warts and all autobiography, and was all the better for it.
River of Consciousness by Oliver Sacks
Upon finishing his autobiography, I went to the local Moreland City Library and borrowed the posthumous book, River of Consciousness, an anthology of his essays, published in October 2017. Most of the essays in River of Consciousness he had previously published in various periodicals or in science-essay-anthology books where he was one of many authors, and are no longer readily obtainable. Sacks specified the order of his essays in River of Consciousness prior to his death. Some of the essays focus on repressed memories and other tricks the mind plays on itself.
I had heard a number of these ideas before in interviews with Sacks. An interesting read but not a classic.
What's next
1. Watch Awakenings again
2. Read The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
