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Title details for And How Are You, Dr. Sacks? by Lawrence Weschler - Available

And How Are You, Dr. Sacks?

A Biographical Memoir of Oliver Sacks

by Lawrence Weschler
Jonathan Davis
Audiobook
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Lawrence Weschler sets Oliver Sacks's brilliant table talk and extravagant personality in vivid relief, casting himself as a beanpole Sancho to Sacks's capacious Quixote. We see Sacks rowing and ranting and caring deeply; composing the essays that would form The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat; recalling his turbulent drug-fueled younger days; helping his patients and exhausting his friends; and waging intellectual war against a medical and scientific establishment that failed to address his greatest concern: the spontaneous specificity of the individual human soul. And all the while he is pouring out a stream of glorious, ribald, hilarious, and often profound conversation that establishes him as one of the great talkers of the age.

Here is the definitive portrait of Sacks as our preeminent romantic scientist, a self-described "clinical ontologist" whose entire practice revolved around the single fundamental question he effectively asked each of his patients: How are you? Which is to say, How do you be?
A question which Weschler, with this book, turns back on the good doctor himself.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    August 13, 2019

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781977363244
      • File size: 426666 KB
      • Duration: 14:48:53

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Jonathan Davis is a top-notch narrator. Here he gives a nicely drawn rendition of a larger-than-life neurologist/author/caregiver. The late Oliver Sacks is presented as flamboyant, impulsive, intuitive, and brilliant. He was born in Great Britain--Davis uses a slight British accent to good effect--but practiced mostly in the States, where his passions were weight lifting, motorcycles, gastronomy, swimming, and writing. He is the author of such clinical memoirs as AWAKENINGS and THE MAN WHO MISTOOK HIS WIFE FOR A HAT. Author Weschler is American, and there are other nationalities that pop up here and there, which are handled easily by Davis. The narration flows along to excellent effect. D.R.W. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      April 15, 2019
      Oliver Sacks, the celebrated neurologist and author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, comes across as a fascinating head case himself in this rollicking memoir. Weschler (Everything That Rises), the emeritus director of the New York Institute of the Humanities, recounts his long friendship with Sacks, focusing on the early 1980s, when Weschler was trying to write a New Yorker profile and biography of the doctor. The book is indeed largely about how the mercurial, neurotic, larger-than-life Sacks was on any given day. It unfolds in visits, outings, and restaurant meals as he veers between ebullient enthusiasms and depression and as the conversation meanders from his motorcycle speeding tickets to his weight-lifting championship, long-distance swimming exploits around the Bronx, his readings of the philosophers Hume and Leibniz, his writer’s block, the lifestyles of octopuses, and his childhood Sabbath rituals. The one constant is Sacks’s almost outrageous empathy for his neuropsychiatry patients (Weschler watched Sacks, a former drug addict, tell a patient that daily marijuana is okay but she should cut back on PCP to once a month). Sacks’s many fans will love this entertaining portrait of a charismatic original. Photos.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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