“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.

“A book of beguiling beauty.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review

“An explorer of that most wonderous of islands, the human brain… Oliver Sacks also loves the oceanic kind of islands… Both kinds figure movingly in this book–part travelogue, part autobiography, part medical mystery story–in which Sacks’s journeys to a tiny Pacific atoll and the island of Guam become explorations of the time, and the complexities of being human.” —D.M. Thomas, The New York Times Book Review

“As a travel writer, Sacks ranks with Paul Theroux and Bruce Chatwin. As an investigator of the mind’s mysteries, he is in a class by himself.” —Publishers Weekly

“Dr. Sacks conjures up his subjects’ lives with enormous compassion and insight, writing simultanteously as a doctor and metaphysician, scientist and father confessor.” —The New Yorker

“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.

“Intimate. . . . Brim[s] with life and affection.” —The New York Times

“A glorious memoir. . . . In this volume Sacks opens himself to recognition, much as he has opened the lives of others to being recognized in their fullness.” —The Atlantic

“Pulses with his distinctive energy and curiosity.” —The New York Review of Books

“[A] beautifully constructed and moving memoir. . . . His life and work are a gift.” —The Times Literary Supplement 

“The celebrated bard of the brain’s quirks reveals a flamboyant secret life and a multitude of intellectual passions in this rangy, introspective autobiography. Sacks’s writing is lucid, earnest, and straightforward, yet always raptly attuned to subtleties of character and feeling in himself and others; the result, closely following his announcement that he had terminal cancer, is a fitting retrospective of his lifelong project of making science a deeply humanistic pursuit.” —Publisher’s Weekly

“Marvelous. . . . He studies himself as he has studied others: compassionately, unblinkingly, intelligently, acceptingly and honestly.” —The Wall Street Journal

“Remarkably candid and deeply affecting. . . . Sacks’s empathy and intellectual curiosity, his delight in, as he calls it, ‘joining particulars with generalities’ and, especially, ‘narratives with neuroscience’—have never been more evident than in his beautifully conceived new book.” —The Boston Globe

“[On the Move] is not only a record of his life-affirming characterological extravagance but also a meditation on what it is to be human in an age of medical arrogance and the numbing clout of technology.” —The Los Angeles Review of Books

“Dr. Sacks writes not just as a doctor and a scientist but also as a humanist with a philosophical and literary bent. . . [his] book not only contributes to our understanding of the elusive magic of music but also illuminates the strange workings, and misfirings, of the human mind.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“Oliver Sacks turns his formidable attention to music and the brain . . . He doesn’t stint on the science . . . but the underlying authority of Musicophilia lies in the warmth and easy command of the author’s voice.” —Mark Coleman, Los Angeles Times

“His work is luminous, original, and indispensable . . . Musicophilia is a Chopin mazurka recital of a book, fast, inventive and weirdly beautiful . . . Yet what is most awe-inspiring is his observational empathy.” —The American Scholar

“[Sacks] weaves neuroscience through a fascinating personal story, allowing us to think about brain functions and music in a bracing new light . . . Human context is what makes good journalism, medical and otherwise. That’s the art of Sacks’ best essays.” —Kevin Berger, Salon

“[Sacks’s] lifelong love for music infuses the writing . . . Musicophilia shows music can be more powerful (even dangerous) than most of us realize, and that defining it may be crucial to defining who we are.” —Andrew Druckenbrod, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“Sacks is adept at turning neurological narratives into humanly affecting stories, by showing how precariously our worlds are poised on a little biochemistry.” —Anthony Gottlieb, The New York Times Book Review

“This was the book that introduced me to Dr. Sacks. I saw him talking about it on the Daily Show and I was so moved by his compassion for the people he writes about. Now I’ve read them all!”

“This book inspired me to embark on a professional career in music therapy.”

Follow along on social media and engage with Oliver Sacks fans around the world!

Musical Minds is a one-hour NOVA documentary on music therapy, produced by Ryan Murdock. Originally broadcast June, 23 2009 on PBS stations. Based on the 2008 BBC documentary by Alan Yentob and Louise Lockwood. This version has additional footage, including fMRI images of Dr. Sacks’s brain as he listens to music.

Icelandic singer Bjork’s album Biophilia, a multimedia project combining music, nature, and technology was inspired in part by Oliver Sacks’s book Musicophilia.