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AND HOW ARE YOU, DR. SACKS?

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF OLIVER SACKS

A thoroughly engaging and enchanting story.

A deeply personal account of the acclaimed neurologist.

Former New Yorker staff writer Weschler (Waves Passing in the Night: Walter Murch in the Land of Astrophysicists, 2017, etc.) concedes that this varied mix of biography and memoir is not a full biography of Oliver Sacks (1933-2015). Rather, the author focuses on the early 1980s, when he was regularly meeting with Sacks, “serving as a sort of Boswell to his Johnson,” compiling notebooks for a profile he planned to write. For Weschler, these years are the “hinge of [Sacks’] professional and creative progress,” when this “virtual hermit would be on the precipice of worldwide fame.” What emerges is a dazzling portrait of a “graphomaniac,” a “grand soliloquizer,” an “unparalleled clinician,” a “studiously detached naturalist,” prodigious swimmer, weight lifter, and reckless motorcycle speed demon. Weschler learned a number of intimate details about Sacks, including that he was gay: “I have lived a life wrapped in concealment and wracked by inhibition,” Sacks told him. He asked Weschler not to publish the profile, and it was only when he was dying that he told him: “Now….You have to.” Much of the book is told in Sacks’ own words, which Weschler transcribed, or from handwritten letters Sacks sent him, giving the narrative a rich immediacy. Early on, he realized Sacks was a prodigy who possessed a “strange consciousness and awareness…of his own oddity.” Weschler also interviewed Sacks’ close friends, including the poet Thom Gunn and Jonathan Miller, the physician member of the comedy revue Beyond the Fringe. The author chronicles his time spent with Sacks on his rounds with patients as he brilliantly diagnosed their neurological illnesses. He joined Sacks when his bestseller, Awakenings, was being filmed; Sacks and Robin Williams became friends. Also included is a forthright “digression” on Sacks’ propensity to exaggerate or make things up. The two were still very close near the end, and Weschler intimately recounts Sacks’ final years.

A thoroughly engaging and enchanting story.

Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-374-23641-0

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: April 27, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019

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NIGHT

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

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INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990). 

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-679-42850-X

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Villard

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995

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