William Chace in Commonweal:
To think today of the late Oliver Sacks, physician and author, is to bring to mind the extraordinary fellow human beings whose defects and gifts, depicted in Sacks’s books and essays, made the world a bit larger and much more interesting: the twin autistic boys who could instantly recall hundred-digit figures; the man who could not identify the person at whom he was staring in the mirror; the sailor for whom the distant past was detailed and vividly clear but for whom the immediate past had no existence; the woman without an awareness that she had been enclosed for sixty years in a body, her own; and, of course, the scores of victims of the 1920s encephalitis epidemic who had been treated with the new L-DOPA drug, and had recovered for a brief period the awareness of living. All these human exceptions peopled the world of medicine that Sacks created for his readers.
More here.
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