Everything in Its Place
First Loves and Last Tales
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From the bestselling author of Musicophilia and On the Move, a final volume of the great physician's essays showcases his broad range of interests--from his passions for ferns, swimming, and horsetails, to his final case histories exploring schizophrenia, dementia, and Alzheimer's.
In his final book, Oliver Sacks examines the passions that defined his life--both as a doctor engaged with the central questions of human existence and as a polymath conversant in all the sciences. Everything in Its Place brings together some of his finest writings on a rich variety of topics. Why do humans need gardens? How, and when, does a physician tell his patient she has Alzheimer's? What is social media doing to our brains? In several of the compassionate case histories included here, we see Sacks consider the enigmas of depression, psychosis, and schizophrenia for the first time. In others, he returns to conditions that have long fascinated him: Tourette's syndrome, aging, dementia, and hallucinations. In counterpoint to these elegant investigations of what makes us human, this volume also includes pieces that celebrate his love of the natural world--and his final meditations on life in the twenty-first century. Everything in Its Place gives us an intimate portrait of a master writer and thinker at work.
About this Author
OLIVER SACKS was born in 1933 in London and educated at Queen's College, Oxford. He completed his medical training at San Francisco's Mount Zion Hospital and at UCLA before moving to New York. Familiar to the readers of The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, Dr. Sacks spent more than fifty years working as a neurologist and wrote many books, including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Musicophilia and Hallucinations, about the strange neurological predicaments and conditions of his patients. Over the years he received many awards, including honours from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Royal College of Physicians. His memoir, On the Move, was published shortly before his death in August 2015.
Reviews
"In this lovely collection of previously unpublished essays, the late, celebrated author and neurologist muses on his career, his youth, the mental health field and much more .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." --Publishers Weekly
"In the last days of his life, Sacks offered strong lamentations about the book as an endangered species and the loss of civility in an age of cellphones and social media. . . . Balanced and insightful, this valedictory collection offers a fine coda to a remarkable life and career." --Kirkus Reviews
"Brings together a remarkable range of uncollected and previously unpublished pieces, exemplifying [Sacks's] wide-ranging passions and versatility as a writer." --Paste Magazine
"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 Book Review
"To describe [Everything in Its Place] as valedictory would be to oversimplify. . . . [W]e are left with an image of the author that is extraordinarily touching--not lacking in his habitual energy and driven curiosity, but somehow vulnerable, even fragile. . . . His writing is direct, transparent, accessible. . . . This is a rare sunbeam in a book that, while rejoicing in a life lived with quite extraordinary richness, is filled with foreboding for the future." --The New York Review of Books
"[Oliver Sacks's] signature charm and self-effacing kindness shine through one last time." --The Seattle Times
PRAISE FOR OLIVER SACKS:
"Sacks is that rare creature, a respected man of science who is also a mean storyteller." --Toronto Star
"To read Sacks . . . is to be captivated as by pages of Dostoevsky or a story by Alice Munro." --Ottawa Citizen
"No one taught me more about how to be a doctor than Oliver Sacks. . . . [He] was like no other clinician, or writer. He was drawn to the homes of the sick, the institutions of the most frail and disabled, the company of the unusual and the 'abnormal.' He wanted to see humanity in its many variants and to do so in his own, almost anachronistic way--face to face, over time, away from our burgeoning apparatus of computers and algorithms. And, through his writing, he showed us what he saw." --Atul Gawande, The New Yorker
"Oliver Sacks's legacy was to restore a vision of a humane medicine that drew its power not from technological breakthroughs alone, but through the healing power of the doctor-patient relationship. . . . We long for thinkers like Dr. Sacks, who remind us that science is about wonder, and who, by so doing, hint that perhaps the idea that we are merely matter in motion is just part of the story, but not the whole story. His emphasis on wonder reminds us that science is about opening, not just closing, questions." --Norman Doidge, The Globe and Mail
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