“Beguiling. . . . Sacks presents a field guide to our quirky operating system’s powers of deception with storytelling that makes readers feel like medical insiders.”

—Chicago Tribune

Sacks has turned hallucinations from something bizarre and frightening into something that seems part of what it means to be a person. His book, too, is a medical and human triumph.” —The Washington Post

“Fascinating. . . . With his special mix of patient case studies, historical accounts, reader correspondence and personal experience, Oliver Sacks has again found a way to unlock one of the mysteries of our brains.” —The Miami Herald

“A thoughtful and compassionate look at the phantoms our brains can produce.” —NPR

“Escorts the reader through case studies and literary excursions into the fantastical land of our perceptions. . . . His vignettes are short, pungent and self-contained. They join his earlier books, starting with Awakenings in 1973—all building blocks that snap our increasing knowledge of the brain into focus.” —The Plain Dealer

Praise for An Anthropologist on Mars

“A multi-faceted masterpiece…a joy to read….Sacks invites hope where hope has been proscribed, an act that by itself makes this book priceless.” —Chicago Tribune

“A wonderful new book [that] hums with emotional and intellectual energy….It is Dr. Sacks’s gift that he has found a way to enlarge our experience and understanding of what the human is.” —Richard Locke, Wall St. Journal

“Engaging…warm…erudite… Sacks is a master at blending science with old fashioned storytelling…he has refined the case-history into an art.” —Time

“Oliver Sacks is a chronicler of possibility. In this rich and penetrating exploration of seven ‘deeply altered selves,’ the author of the bestselling The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and the metaphysical Awakenings opens to the reader doors of perception generally passed through only by those ‘at the far borders of human experience.’” —Boston Sunday Globe

“Oliver Sacks is the Carl Sagan or Stephen Jay Gould of his field; his books are true classics of medical writing, of the breadth of human mentality, and of the inner lives of the disabled.” —Mary Ellen Curtin

The Music Never Stopped – an independent feature film based on “The Last Hippie,” a story in An Anthropologist on Mars. Starring Lou Taylor Pucci, Julia Ormond, J.K. Simmons, and Cara Seymour. Directed by Jim Kohlberg, from a script by Gwyn Lurie and Gary Marks. Chosen to premiere at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival and the Berlin Film Festival. Opening in theaters in March 2011. More info here.

“Compulsively readable. . . . Dr. Sacks writes beautifully and with exceptional subtlety and penetration into both the state of mind of his patients and the nature of illness generally. . . . A brilliant and humane book.” —The Observer

“[Sacks] opens to the reader doors of perception generally passed through only by those at the far borders of human experience.” —The Boston Globe

“A masterpiece.” —W. H. Auden

“Experiences so strange that they are difficult to conceive are not limited to travels up the Amazon or to the Moon, but can occur within the confines of the human head…This long sleep and sudden awakening to a strange new world…though so alien, have an immediate power to grip the imagination. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that through this book we live with the dead, brought back from the past…The book is an extraordinary compound of clinical observation and, one feels, deep understanding of the plight of these people…One senses in the author a passion to communicate his discoveries with all the power of his intellect, knowledge and deep compassion–so that we may “awake.’” —Richard Gregory, The Listener

“This book is a neurologist’s account of his experience with a so-called miracle drug from the epidemic of sleeping sickness which swept the world in the 1920s. Dr. Sacks writes beautifully and with exceptional subtlety and penetration into both the state of mind of his patients and the nature of illness in general….Compulsively readable…a brilliant and humane book.” —A. Alvarez, Observer

“It makes you aware of the knife-edge we live on.” —Doris Lessing

“This doctor’s report is written in a prose of such beauty that you might well look in vain for its equal among living practitioners of belles lettres.” —Frank Kermode, Daily Telegraph

Feature film starring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro, Julie Kavner and John Heard. Produced by Walter Parkes and Larry Lasker, directed by Penny Marshall, screenplay by Steven Zaillian. Released December 1990 by Columbia Pictures. Awakenings was nominated for three Academy Awards. Received the 1991 Scriptor Award. More info here. Stream now.

An opera composed by Tobias Picker, libretto by Aryeh Lev Stollman, based on the book Awakenings by Oliver Sacks. Commissioned for the Opera Theatre of St. Louis. World premiere: June 5, 2021. More info.