Description

From the bestselling author of On Gratitude and On the Move.

In this spirited volume, Oliver Sacks examines the many passions of his own life – both as a doctor engaged with the central questions of human existence, and as a polymath conversant in all the sciences. 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 collected here, Sacks considers for the first time the enigmas of depression, psychosis, and schizophrenia, and in others he returns to conditions that have long fascinated him: Tourette’s syndrome, ageing, dementia, and hallucinations. In counterpoint to these elegant investigations of what makes us human, this volume also includes pieces that celebrate Sacks’s love of the natural world – and his last 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.

Publisher Review

If you are not already familiar with the writing of Oliver Sacks, this volume is a lovely way to acquaint yourself with it . . . Sacks is a humanist author, one who has an amazing capacity to inspire awe and reawaken the reader to the beauty of the smallest and often most unforgotten, disenfranchised aspects of life on earth. Above all, his greatest strength is how he skillfully allows the non-specialist to deeply delve into the field of neurological study. He is an author with a sense of constant questioning and bewilderment at the complexity of human existence. His writing is beautifully crafted and profound * New York Journal of Books * 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 * Scientist * Extraordinarily touching-not lacking in his habitual energy and driven curiosity, but somehow vulnerable, even fragile . . . [He was] an unusual boy, one who had, as he puts it, an "overwhelming sense of Truth and Beauty" . . . and it becomes increasingly clear that Sacks was that boy to the very end of his days, engaging, eagerly and with a never-ending sense of wonder, not only with science but with its history and the people who made it . . . 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 * Magical . . . [Everything in Its Place] showcases the neurologist's infinitely curious mind * People Magazine * Wonderfully odd . . . 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 *