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

Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood

Greg Fearon — Sun, 20 Mar 2022 15:26:35 +0000

“Artful, impassioned memoir of a youth spent lost in the blinding light of chemistry.”

— Kirkus Reviews

Uncle Tungsten

Memories of a Chemical Boyhood

“I had intended, towards the end of 1997, to write a book on aging, but then found myself flying in the opposite direction, thinking of youth, and my own partly war-dominated, partly chemistry-dominated youth, in particular, and the enormous scientific family I had grown up in. No book has caused me more pain, or given me more fun, than writing Uncle T.–or, finally, such a sense of coming-to-terms with life, and reconciliation and catharsis.” —Oliver Sacks

Sacks invokes his childhood in wartime England and his early scientific fascination with light, matter and energy as a mystic might invoke the transformative symbolism of metals and salts.

The “Uncle Tungsten” of the book’s title is Sacks’s Uncle Dave, who manufactured light bulbs with filaments of fine tungsten wire, and who first initiated Sacks into the mysteries of metals. The author of this illuminating and poignant memoir describes his four tortuous years at boarding school during the war, where he was sent to escape the bombings, and his profound inquisitiveness cultivated by living in a household steeped in learning, religion and politics (both his parents were doctors and his aunts were ardent Zionists). But as Sacks writes, the family influence extended well beyond the home, to include the groundbreaking chemists and physicists whom he describes as “honorary ancestors, people to whom, in fantasy, I had a sort of connection.” Family life exacted another transformative influence as well: his older brother Michael’s psychosis made him feel that “a magical and malignant world was closing in about him,” perhaps giving a hint of what led the author to explore the depths of psychosis in his later professional life.

For Sacks, the onset of puberty coincided with his discovery of biology, his departure from his childhood love of chemistry and, at age 14, a new understanding that he would become a doctor. Many readers and patients are happy with that decision.

Oliver Sacks as a young boy.

Praise for Uncle Tungsten

“This book underlies everything else Dr. Sacks has written, “and” is worthy to stand with the great scientific memoirs, for its passion, its insight, its sense of history and its felicity.” —Paul Theroux

“In Uncle Tungsten, Oliver Sacks weaves together the wonders of chemistry and his boyhood experiences with grace, ease, and just the right comedic touch. The result is a rich, unique, and compelling glimpse into the development of an enormously fertile and creative mind.”
—Brian Greene

“Oliver Sacks is an extraordinary soul-scientist and artist, healer and explorer-and he has given us an extraordinary memoir. Uncle Tungsten is profoundly illuminating and continually surprising.” —James Gleick

“A rare gem…. Fresh, joyous, wistful, generous, and tough-minded.” —New York Times Book Review

“Fired by Sacks’s enthusiasm-obviously genuine, impossible to feign-bursting forth in all directions. . . .The book recounts the growth of a formidable young mind opening up to the order and beauty of the material world.” —Newsday

“”Sack’s study of a mind [is] as tough as tungsten, as fluid as mercury . . . as precious as gold.” —The Seattle Times

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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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On The Move: A Life

Greg Fearon — Thu, 03 Mar 2022 10:05:51 +0000

“[A] wonderful memoir, which richly demonstrates what an extraordinary life it has been. . . . A fascinating account—a sort of extended case study, really—of Sacks’ remarkably active, iconoclastic adulthood.”

— Los Angeles Times

On The Move

“Life must be lived forwards but can only be understood backwards.” ― Kierkegard

When Oliver Sacks was twelve years old, a perceptive schoolmaster wrote in his report: “Sacks will go far, if he does not go too far.” It is now abundantly clear that Sacks has never stopped going. From its opening pages on his youthful obsession with motorcycles and speed, On the Move is infused with his restless energy. As he recounts his experiences as a young neurologist in the early 1960s, first in California, where he struggled with drug addiction and then in New York, where he discovered a long forgotten illness in the back wards of a chronic hospital, we see how his engagement with patients comes to define his life.

With unbridled honesty and humor, Sacks shows us that the same energy that drives his physical passions — weightlifting and swimming—also drives his cerebral passions. He writes about his love affairs, both romantic and intellectual; his guilt over leaving his family to come to America; his bond with his schizophrenic brother; and the writers and scientists—Thom Gunn, A.R. Luria, W.H. Auden, Francis Crick — who influenced him. On the Move is the story of a brilliantly unconventional physician and writer — and of the man who illuminated the many ways that the brain makes us human.

Playlist

Add some musical accompaniment to your reading of On The Move with these Sacks-inspired tracks, curated by Brain Pickings’ Maria Popova, for SciFri Book Club.

Oliver Sacks, with his 250cc Norton Motorcycle in 1956.

Lifting weights as a novice at the Maccabi Club in London, 1956.

Oliver Sacks with his parter, Bill Hayes.

Praise for On The Move

“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

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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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