Dear Oliver: An Unexpected Friendship with Oliver Sacks. This item is unavailable.Dear Oliver: An Unexpected Friendship with Oliver Sacks

To the world, he was Dr. Sacks, the brilliant neurologist behind bestselling books like Musicophilia and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. To professor Susan Barry, he became Dear Oliver--her mentor, friend, and confidant over the course of their unlikely, engrossing ten-year correspondence.

It begins with a letter that Sue almost doesn't send. Dear Dr. Sacks . . . You asked me if I could imagine what the world would look like when viewed with two eyes. Sue's unheard-of case history--as a "stereoblind" patient who acquired 3D vision in adulthood--so fascinates Dr. Sacks that he immediately asks to visit her. As "Stereo Sue," she becomes the subject of one of his indelible New Yorker pieces--and, as a fellow neuroscientist, his sounding board for every kind of intellectual inquiry.

Their shared passions--from classical music to cuttlefish, brain plasticity to bioluminescent plankton--spark a friendship that buoys both of them through life's crests and falls: as Sue becomes an author in her own right, as she supports her father in his decline, and as Oliver becomes a patient himself--battling cancer that, in a painful twist, robs him of his own vision.

Dr. Sacks's letters to Sue offer his devoted readers an unprecedented glimpse of the man himself--from his legendary compassion and insight to his love of the periodic table (which he kept in his wallet). Throughout Dear Oliver, we are reminded that true friends help each other see the world a little differently.

Susan R. Barry is a professor emerita of neuroscience and behavior at Mount Holyoke College. She is the author of Fixing My Gaze, named a best book of the year by Amazon and Library Journal, and Coming to Our Senses. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Big Think, and on Science Friday, Fresh Air, and Morning Edition. She lives in Massachusetts.

Oliver Sacks was a physician, a bestselling author, and a professor of neurology at the NYU School of Medicine. The New York Times referred to him as "the poet laureate of medicine." As an author, he is best known for his collections of neurological case histories, including The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, and An Anthropologist on Mars. Dr. Sacks was a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books.