'Oliver Sacks's Letters isn't a book of the year - it's a book for a lifetime . . . Keep this
by your side dip into it be reminded of the wonders of our shared humanity' - Erica Wagner
'Books of the year 2024' New Statesman A New Yorker and New Statesman Book of the Year 2024
Oliver Sacks one of the great humanists of our age - who describes himself in these pages as a
'philosophical physician' and an 'astronomer of the inward' - wrote to an eclectic array of
family and friends. Most were scientists artists and writers even statesmen: Francis Crick
Antonio Damasio Jane Goodall W. H. Auden Susan Sontag Stephen Jay Gould Björk and his
first cousin Abba Eban. But many of the most eloquent letters in this collection are addressed
to the ordinary people who wrote to him with their odd symptoms and questions to whom he
responds with a sense of generosity and wonder. With some correspondents Sacks shares his
struggle for recognition and acceptance both as a physician and as a gay man providing
intimate accounts as well of his passions for competitive weightlifting motorcycles botany
and music. With others he chronicles his penchant for testing the boundaries of authority the
discovery of his writer's voice and his explosive seasons of discovery with the patients who
populate his book Awakenings . His descriptions of travels as a young man and the
extraordinary people he encounters can be lyrical ferocious penetrating and hilarious. Many
of his musings include the first detailed sketches of an essay forming in his mind or
miniature case histories rivalling those in his beloved essay collections. Sensitively
selected and introduced by Kate Edgar Sacks's longtime editor the letters trace the arc of a
remarkable life and reveal an often surprising portrait of Sacks as he wrestles with the
workings of his own brain and mind. 'Here is the unedited Oliver Sacks - struggling
passionate a furiously intelligent misfit. And also endless interesting. He was a man like no
other' - Atul Gawande author of Being Mortal 'Sacks is an endearing and entertaining prose
stylist - inquisitive often funny never obtuse . . . Letters is crammed with off-the-cuff
profundities moments of elevated perception that briefly unriddle the more inscrutable aspects
of human nature.' - Ralf Webb Guardian
