The result for readers has been a sequence of mesmerising, ever entertaining and hilarious, but nevertheless serious meditations on the brain – and consciousness. His reporting of human incidents was concerned with those unable to function in ordinary society, but Sacks never saw them as damaged or alien “others”, more as different. Above all there is his ability to empathise, always with profound curiosity, with the quirky and idiosyncratic brains of his patients, who were so beyond the norm neurologically.Īs he himself said, he worked at the interface between biography and biology.

What is entrancing is the depth of his self-knowledge, translated and metamorphosed into an engaged, intense intellectual – and deeply affectionate – connection with scholars alive and dead, including friendships with WH Auden and Francis Crick.

He died at the end of August that year, aged 82. Diagnosed with inoperable cancer in early 2015, a short book titled, accurately but not mawkishly, Gratitude, was published with his epigraph: I am now face to face with dying but I am not finished with living. Who could resist his narratives of patients who had, to say the least, unusual brains: the subject of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, the astonishing musical savants who could communicate only through music in Musicophilia, or Awakenings about brain-damaged people affected by the infamous “sleepy sickness” ( encephalitis lethargica) who could emerge briefly after being administered the medication L-DOPA.Īn autobiographer too, aware of his own flaws and talents, Sacks was an enthusiastic mountain climber (he suffered a bad leg injury while climbing), a drug addict as a young man, a passionate swimmer all his life in his last decade he found and realised, after a past of transitory gay affairs, that profound human dream, a loving and fulfilling emotional and intellectual relationship with a committed partner.

Gratitude oliver sacks review