Botany Archives - Oliver Sacks | Official Website of Author, Neurologist & Foundation

Oaxaca Journal

Greg Fearon — Sun, 20 Mar 2022 14:30:34 +0000

“Light and fast-moving… Among the botanical and anthropological observations, one catches glimpses of Sacks’s inner life.”

— The New Yorker

Oaxaca Journal

“I have been an inveterate keeper of journals since I was fourteen, especially at times of adventure and crisis and travel. Here, for the first time, such a journal made its way to publication, not that much changed from the raw, handwritten journal that I kept during my fascinated nine days in Oaxaca.” —Oliver Sacks

Oliver Sacks is best known as an explorer of the human mind, a neurologist with a gift for the complex, insightful portrayals of people and their conditions that fuel the phenomenal success of his books. But he is also a card-carrying member of the American Fern Society, and since childhood has been fascinated by these primitive plants and their ability to survive and adapt. Now the best-selling author of Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat brings his ceaseless curiosity and eye for the wondrous to the province of Oaxaca, Mexico.

Oaxaca Journal is Sacks’s spellbinding account of his recent trip with a group of fellow fern enthusiasts to the beautiful, history-steeped province of Oaxaca. Bringing together Sacks’s passion for natural history and the richness of human culture with his penetrating curiosity and trammeling eye for detail, Oaxaca Journal is a captivating evocation of a places, its plants, its people, and its myriad wonders.

Oliver Sacks at New York Botanical Garden. Photo by Roberto Calasso

Ceradenia sacksii, “Sacks’ waxy-gland fern,” a newly identified fern named after Oliver Sacks by botanist Michael Sundue.

Ceratozamia oliversacksii, a new species of cycad named after Oliver Sacks by Dennis Wm. Stevenson, Curator Emeritus at the New York Botanical Garden. Illustration by Abi Inman

A world in harmony.
Every plant in summer bloom,
to greet you all,
their fellow blossoming flowers.

Lyrics from the world’s first aria ever devoted to cycads—from Tobias Picker and Aryeh Lev Stollman’s opera adaptation of Sacks’s 1973 book Awakenings.

Praise for Oaxaca Journal

“Sacks doesn’t waste a word. . . . He deftly characterizes people he meets along the way, smoothly slips facts from his wide-ranging reading into his narrative, expertly describes landscapes and raises up a hero: Boone Hallberg, a U.S.-born scientist who has lived in Oaxaca since the 1940s, working to conserve the priceless diversity of the natural world.” –San Francisco Chronicle

“Light and fast-moving. . . . Among the botanical and anthropological observations, one catches glimpses of Sacks’s inner life: his preoccupation with dualities, his nearly Victorian sense of modesty, his fascination with the world around him.” —The New Yorker

“The combination of his insatiable curiosity and rigorous scientific observation makes him an excellent travelling companion. . . . Mexico past and present emerges from these bursts of association and digression. . . . With so much of the world made superficially familiar by tourism, Oliver Sacks’s dogged pursuit of the exotic is especially welcome. He has, moreover, succeeded in striking that elusive balance of input between traveler and culture that makes for good travel writing.” —Times Literary Supplement

“Relaxed yet observant. . . . [Sacks’] thoughtful, sometimes wistful ruminations, no matter how expansive they may grow, are always rooted in the concrete details he has observed. . . . Those who read Oaxaca Journal will appreciate Sacks’ own diligence as an observer and his skill in translating the wonders of the material world into words.” —Los Angeles Times

“Oaxaca Journal whipped up my appetite for a visit to Mexico, as the best travel writing does.” —The Providence Journal

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The Island of the Colorblind

Robert C. Bowman III — Wed, 09 Mar 2022 21:43:30 +0000

“Sack’s total immersion in island life makes this luminous, beautifully written report a wondrous voyage of discovery.”

— The New York Times Book Review

The Island Of The Colorblind

“Here, as in Seeing Voices, I was concerned not only with individuals, but with whole populations; thus, I felt as much an anthropologist as a doctor when seeing the impact on the chammoros of a terrible neurodegenerative disease in Guam, and of a hereditory total color-blindness in the tiny coral atol of Pingelap. But these two little books often broke away from the purely medical, and became journals of travel and enchantment in the tropical islands.” —Oliver Sacks

Oliver Sacks has always been fascinated by islands–their remoteness, their mystery, above all the unique forms of life they harbor. For him, islands conjure up equally the romance of Melville and Stevenson, the adventure of Magellan and Cook, and the scientific wonder of Darwin and Wallace.

Drawn to the tiny Pacific atoll of Pingelap by intriguing reports of an isolated community of islanders born totally colorblind, Dr. Sacks finds himself setting up a clinic in a one-room island dispensary, where he listens to these achromatopic islanders describe their colorless world in rich terms of pattern and tone, luminance and shadow. And on Guam, where he goes to investigate the puzzling neurodegenerative paralysis endemic there for a century, he becomes, for a brief time, an island neurologist, making house calls with his colleague John Steele, amid crowing cockerels, cycad jungles, and the remains of a colonial culture.

The islands reawaken Sacks’ lifelong passion for botany–in particular, for the primitive cycad trees, whose existence dates back to the Paleozoic–and the cycads are the starting point for an intensely personal reflection on the meaning of islands, the dissemination of species, the genesis of disease, and the nature of deep geologic time. Out of an unexpected journey, Sacks has woven an unforgettable narrative which immerses us in the romance of island life, and shares his own compelling vision of the complexities of being human.

Photo by Sanne De Wilde, Noor. The Belgian photographer's 'Island of the Colorblind' exhibition documented the achromats of Pingelap and the neighboring island of Pohnpei.

Praise for Island of the Colorblind

“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

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The River of Consciousness

Robert C. Bowman III — Sat, 05 Mar 2022 17:12:49 +0000

“The warm genius of Oliver Sacks comes alive as he tackles everything from memory to Freud’s little-known contributions to neurology, Darwin’s love of flowers and the nature of creativity.”

— Brainpickings

The River of Consciousness

Two weeks before his death, Oliver Sacks outlined the contents of The River of Consciousness, the last book he would oversee . . . The bestselling author of On the Move, Musicophilia, and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Sacks is known for his illuminating case histories about people living with neurological conditions at the far borderlands of human experience. But his grasp of science was not restricted to neuroscience or medicine; he was fascinated by the issues, ideas, and questions of all the sciences. That wide-ranging expertise and passion informs the perspective of this book, in which he interrogates the nature not only of human experience but of all life.

In The River of Consciousness, Dr. Sacks takes on evolution, botany, chemistry, medicine, neuroscience, and the arts, and calls upon his great scientific and creative heroes – above all, Darwin, Freud, and William James. For Sacks, these thinkers were constant companions from an early age; the questions they explored – the meaning of evolution, the roots of creativity, and the nature of consciousness – lie at the heart of science and of this book.

The River of Consciousness demonstrates Sacks’s unparalleled ability to make unexpected connections, his sheer joy in knowledge, and his unceasing, timeless endeavor to understand what makes us human.

“I rejoice in the knowledge of my biological uniqueness and my biological antiquity and my biological kinship with all other forms of life. This knowledge roots me, allows me to feel at home in the natural world, to feel that I have my own sense of biological meaning, whatever my role in the cultural, human world.” ―Oliver Sacks

Oliver Sacks and Kate Edgar enjoying the ferns at Longwood Gardens.

Praise for The River of Consciousness

A joy to read: a delicious supply of information and commentary organized by a gifted writer of a curious and humane intelligence.” —The Washington Times

“Charming and informative….What really unifies “The River of Consciousness” is the unique combination of intellectual rigor and childlike amazement, of bookishness and warmth, which characterizes all of Sacks’s writing. Which other writer who employs footnotes so liberally also so often inspires laughter and tears?” —The Boston Globe

“Fans of the late neurologist have another chance to enjoy this erudite, compassionate storyteller, essayist, and memoirist in what may be his final work. This collection of 10 essays, some of which appeared previously in the New York Review of Books, was assembled by three colleagues from an outline provided by Sacks two weeks before his death in 2015….A collection of dissimilar pieces that reveal the scope of the author’s interests—sometimes challenging, always rewarding.” —Kirkus Reviews

[The] combination of wonder, passion and gratitude never seemed to flag in Sacks’s life; everything he wrote was lit with it. But it was his openness to new ideas and experiences, and his vision of change as the most human of biological processes, that synthesized all of his work.” —Nicole Krauss, The New York Times Book Review

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Everything In Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales

Robert C. Bowman III — Wed, 02 Mar 2022 10:50:59 +0000

“Life bursts through all of Oliver Sacks’s writing. He was and will remain a brilliant singularity. It’s hard to call to mind one dull passage in his work — one dull sentence, for that matter.”

— The New York Times

Everything In Its Place

First Loves and Last Tales

“In forty years of medical practice, I have found only two types of non-pharmaceutical ‘therapy’ to be vitally important for patients with chronic neurological diseases: music and gardens.” — Oliver Sacks

A final volume of essays that showcase Oliver Sacks’s broad range of interests — from his passion for ferns, swimming, and horsetails, to his final case histories exploring schizophrenia, dementia, and Alzheimer’s.

Oliver Sacks, renowned scientist and storyteller, is adored by readers for his neurological case histories, his fascination and familiarity with human behaviour at its most unexpected and unfamiliar. Published posthumously in 2019, Everything in Its Place is a celebration of Sacks’s myriad interests, all told with his characteristic compassion, erudition, and luminous prose.

From the celebrated case history of Spalding Gray that appeared in The New Yorker four months before his death to reflections on mental asylums; from piercing accounts of Schizophrenia to a reminiscence of Robin Williams; from the riveting tale of a medical colleague falling victim to Alzheimer’s to the healing power of gardens, and, from; a critique of social media to the threat of climate change, this volume celebrates and reflects the wondrous curiosity of Oliver Sacks.

“I had stopped about halfway around to look at a charming gazebo by the water’s edge, got out and strolled up the street, saw a little red house for sale, was shown round it (still dripping) by the puzzled owners, walked along to the real estate agent and convinced her of my interest (she was not used to customers in swim trunks), reentered the water on the other side of the island, and swam back to Orchard Beach, having acquired a house in midswim.” — Oliver Sacks, Everything In Its Place

Oliver Sacks at Oxford’s Botanic Garden, circa 1952. Photo by David Drazin

Photo by Bill Hayes

Praise for Everything In Its Place

“Extraordinarily touching—not lacking in his habitual energy and driven curiosity, but somehow vulnerable, even fragile . . . Our best chance for the future, we may feel, is that there may be others among us like this uncommon, passionate, and enlightened man . . .”—Simon Callow, The New York Review of Books

“In this lovely collection of previously unpublished essays, the late, celebrated author and neurologist muses on his career, his youth, the mental health field and much more. . . [this] final collection is a treat for the chronically curious.”—Publisher’s Weekly

“Eclectic and satisfying . . . Informative and engaging . . . Sacks writes with his characteristic compassion and attention to detail. . . This final posthumous collection provides one last peek into the author’s generous, curious, and brilliant mind.”—Library Journal

“Sacks further secures his legacy with this most recent collection of his work . . . The Shakespeare of science writing might suffice, but Sacks ultimately defies comparison to bygone or even contemporary authors. As readers we can rejoice that, while cancer may have claimed his body, his voice continues to ring out.”—The Scientist

“Everything in Its Place is a wondrous read in its entirety, irradiating Sacks’s kaleidoscopic curiosity across subjects. . .”—Maria Popova, Brain Pickings

“Magical . . . [Everything in Its Place] showcases the neurologist’s infinitely curious mind.”—People Magazine

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