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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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GENGHIS KHAN AND THE MAKING OF THE MODERN WORLD

A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.

“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”

No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.

A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.

Pub Date: March 2, 2004

ISBN: 0-609-61062-7

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003

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