“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