Letters by Oliver Sacks review

I was lucky enough to attend a lecture given by Dr. Sacks circa 1988. He was a resident speaker for the University of California campuses and had come to UCSC to talk about Awakenings and other topics. He was such a sensitive, kind, gentle person.

It was a privilege to simply be in the audience and the audience was very small. For some reason students didn't take advantage of the opportunity, right in front of them, to come and see him speak. Baffling.

When I saw him, he was in his mid-fifties and the picture of an English academic doctor/professor. It is a kick to see what he looked like in 1961. That BMW he's sitting on is a classic.

The world lost a very special person when he died in 2015.

The contrast in Sacks's hobbies made me laugh. Amusing to see a neurologist, who's complemented for being

> a brilliant and vivid mind, a man whose intellectual appetite was vast, and whose professional and creative passions – far from being the self-absorbed obsessions of a pedant – were first and foremost an act of reaching out, the means through which he sought to communicate with others, a “love affair with the world”

and whose work, Letters, is

> crammed with off-the-cuff profundities, moments of elevated perception that briefly unriddle the more inscrutable aspects of human nature

can still enjoy the simpler (and funny) things in life, like bulking up via powerlifting:

> As a man of 30, dallying with powerlifting, Sacks routinely bragged to his parents about his weight, how much he could lift, the amount he ate – “I love to shake the pavement as I walk, to part crowds like the prow of a ship.” At Mount Zion, special scrubs had to be made to accommodate his bulk, and he found himself in disfavour with his superiors for stealing patients’ food.

> Letters represents a mere fraction of the total in his archives, which runs to more than 200,000 pages

whoah. Sacks averaged about 11 pages per day for 50 years (that are known about).

Sacks books left me deeply impressed but up to this day I don't know if they are scientifically accurate or partially fictional or exaggerated. Wikipedia is not a reliable advisor on such matters so any credible review recommendations are welcome.

Has anyone read the book? The New Yorker had some excerpts from his letters recently (around the "awakenings" era) and they seemed a bit haphazardly put together at first glance - more of interest to a literature scholar than a casual reader. Should I just stick with his actual books, or would a casual reader enjoy the letters too?

He made a few appearances on the RadioLab podcast. Always one of my favorite to listen to.

shame that these guys are just myths now. while I haven't read Sacks, the description reminds me of writers like plimpton, hemmingway, and thompson, who were the protagonists of their own stories and writing to capture an essence that we were just sold as fiction because it's the only way anyone would believe it.

i was disappointed to read the article though. he sounded really cool, and I don't think the author did him the justice that another man who knows those things or has done them could have recognized or appreciated.

Wasn't sure what was so special about the letters written by a mid-century neurologist, one among many, until I got to this part at the very start of the article:

> A young queer man with a growing interest in motorcycle leather, Sacks had other reasons to leave

He might have been a great guy, I couldn't tell, cause the reviewer was first and foremost interested in who this guy was having intercourse with, and not in what he was actually saying/believing/thinking of. Many such cases of late.