On the Move: A Life - Softcover

Sacks, Oliver

4.02

20,513 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1447264061 ISBN 13: 9781447264064

Publisher: Picador, 2016

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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 and then in New York, where he discovered a long-forgotten illness in the back wards of a chronic hospital, as well as with a group of patients who would define his life, it becomes clear that Sacks's earnest desire for engagement has occasioned unexpected encounters and travels - sending him through bars and alleys, over oceans, and across continents.

With unbridled honesty and humour, Sacks shows us that the same energy that drives his physical passions - bodybuilding, weightlifting, 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 makes us human.

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Review:

Deeply moving. . . a gift to his readers - of erudition, sympathy and an abiding understanding of the joys, trials and consolations of the human condition (Michiko Kakutani New York Times)

Sacks's empathy and intellectual curiosity, his delight in, as he calls it, "joining particulars with generalities" and, especially, "narratives with neuroscience" - have never been more evident than in his beautifully conceived new book. . .remarkably candid and deeply affecting (Boston Globe)

Honest, lucid, passionate, humorous, humane and human (also slightly Martian). . .[a] marvelous memoir, which is as unconventional and singular as the man himself (Colin McGinn Wall Street Journal)

Absorbing (Chicago Tribune)

A fascinating account - a sort of extended case study, really - of Sacks' remarkably active, iconoclastic adulthood. . . .On the Move is filled with both wonder and wonderments (LA Times)

Intensely, beautifully, incandescently alive (Newsday)

On the Move is as much a dense journal of Sacks's own astonishing, incident-rich life as a meaty handbook on how to live (Globe and Mail)

No matter what he writes about - whether struggling to understand what his patients are going through, or describing his love of swimming or photography - Sacks always seems open to learning more. He appears keenly interested in everything and everyone he encounters. He's a wonderful storyteller, a gift he says he inherited from his parents, both of whom were doctors. But as he proves again in his latest . . . book, it's his keen attentiveness as a listener and observer, and his insatiable curiosity, that makes his work so powerful (San Francisco Chronicle)

On the Move is entertaining and illuminating and sometimes shocking, and it's given a deep tinge of poignancy by Sacks' public announcement in February that he has terminal cancer. If On the Move is his effort, at age 81 and in the face of death, to record a life well lived, he has succeeded beautifully (Tampa Bay Times)

A compelling read. . .The memoir offers a glimpse into one of the greatest minds of our time, made all the more special by the knowledge that it's one of his last gifts to a devoted readership (Men’s Journal)

Book Description:

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

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