Summary: 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." 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. Sacks shows us that the same energy that drives his physical passions -- weight lifting 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, Gerald M. Edelman, Francis Crick -- who influenced him.
Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* Sacks characterizes himself primarily as a storyteller, the son of storytellers—mother and father both—rather than as a physician, the other identity he shares with both parents. He's melded those roles in a string of best-selling collections of case histories from his practice as a clinical neurologist. Anyone pleased by any of them will be enthralled with his own story, which he fills out with not just the personal reasons, such as making fascinating friends, but also the scientific ones, such as contributing to new conceptions of brain function, that make what he tells us worth telling. He also, perhaps all unawares, reveals himself as a restless achiever and a bit of a daredevil. If avidly reading historic medical literature from adolescence on seems entirely appropriate to a writing clinician, surely youthful passions for motorcycling and weightlifting (on early-'60s Muscle Beach, yet) are a bit surprising (when injuries quashed those pursuits, Sacks fell back on hard swimming and scuba diving). And if strong late friendships with the stars of brain research seem inevitable, others begun well before he was famous, such as with the poets W. H. Auden and Thom Gunn, attest the estheticism in him that is the mainspring of his 2007 best-seller, Musicophilia. That Sacks is homosexual barely glints among the other lights of his long, eventful life. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: That the author's previous books have been popular in libraries should more than suggest that most public librarians need to have this new one in their collection. Copyright 2014 Booklist Reviews.
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