'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 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. '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
