
Letters
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Narrated by:
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James Langton
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Kate Edgar
About this listen
One of The New Statesman's Best Books of the Year
One of Kirkus Reviews' Best Nonfiction Books of 2024
One of The New Yorker's 'Best Books We've Read in 2024 So Far'
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE • The letters of one of the greatest observers of the human species, revealing his passion for life and work, friendship and art, medicine and society, and the richness of his relationships with friends, family, and fellow intellectuals over the decades, collected here for the first time
“Here is the unedited Oliver Sacks—struggling, passionate, a furiously intelligent misfit. And also endless interesting. He was a man like no other.”—Atul Gawande, author of Being Mortal
Dr. Oliver Sacks—who describes himself in this book as a “philosophical physician” and a “neuropathological Talmudist”—wrote letters throughout his life: to his parents and his beloved Auntie Len, to friends and colleagues from London, Oxford, California, and around the world. The letters begin with his arrival in America as a young man, eager to establish himself away from the confines of postwar England, and carry us through his bumpy early career in medicine and the discovery of his writer’s voice; his weight-lifting, motorcycle-riding years and his explosive seasons of discovery with the patients who populate his book Awakenings; his growing interest in matters of sight and the musical brain; his many friendships and exchanges with writers, artists, and scientists (to say nothing of astronauts, botanists, and mathematicians), and his deep gratitude for all these relationships at the end of his life.
Sensitively introduced and edited by Kate Edgar, Sacks’s longtime editor, the letters deliver a portrait of Sacks as he wrestles with the workings of the brain and mind. We see, through his eyes, the beginnings of modern neuroscience, following the thought processes of one of the great intellectuals of our time, whose words, as evidenced in this book, were unfailingly shaped with generosity and wonder toward other people.
©2024 Oliver Sacks (P)2024 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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FOR COMMITED LOVERS OF OLIVER SACKS WORK
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Why is this an audio book?
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When Abigail Thomas’s husband, Rich, was hit by a car, his brain shattered. Subject to rages, terrors, and hallucinations, he must live the rest of his life in an institution. He has no memory of what he did the hour, the day, the year before. This tragedy is the ground on which Abigail had to build a new life. How she built that life is a story of great courage and great change, of moving to a small country town, of a new family composed of three dogs, knitting, and friendship, of facing down guilt and discovering gratitude.
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An Anthropologist on Mars
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
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-
-
SACKS IS AN ABSOLUTE JOY !!
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Critic reviews
"Oliver Sacks’s Letters isn’t a book of the year—it’s a book for a lifetime. The great neurologist’s brilliance and humanity is no secret; but here (superbly edited by Kate Edgar) the reader sees his life unfold in real time: his original, challenging work, his love for his family, his unique passions, his evolving relationship to his sexuality. Keep this by your side, dip into it, be reminded of the wonders of our shared humanity."—New Statesman
“The first 200 pages of Oliver Sacks’s letters are among the best things I’ve read all year. He was new in America, not long out of Oxford University, writing to family and friends back home, and his observations were electric—wild and funny and befuddled and frank.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times
“A neurologist by trade, Sacks was insatiably curious and wrote ceaselessly and joyfully about anything that caught his interest, which was just about everything. Readers get a new glimpse into his mind this year, nearly a decade after his death, thanks to a handsome new collection of the doctor’s letters compiled and annotated by his longtime editor, Kate Edgar. To read these letters is to be reminded of the deeply felt humanism and ebullience that Sacks brought to his prose. . . . The letters can be read as an autobiography written in real time, as they portray the play of his mind as his life played out. They function as a kind of biography of Sacks’ inner life and the felicitous and rigorous nature of his thought.”—Los Angeles Times
Editorial Review
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-
-
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-
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Story
From the best-selling author of Gratitude and On the Move, a final volume of essays that showcase Sacks's broad range of interests - from his passion for ferns, swimming, and horsetails, to his final case histories exploring schizophrenia, dementia, and Alzheimer's.
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Missing Sacks
- By Brandy on 12-02-19
By: Oliver Sacks
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A Leg to Stand On
- By: Oliver Sacks
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis, Oliver Sacks - introduction
- Length: 7 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Dr. Oliver Sacks's books Awakenings, An Anthropologist on Mars and the best-selling The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat have been acclaimed for their compassion in the treatment of patients affected with profound disorders. In A Leg to Stand On, it is Sacks himself who is the patient: an encounter with a bull on a desolate mountain in Norway has left him with a severely damaged leg. But what should be a routine recuperation is actually the beginning of a strange medical journey.
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Not sure what he was trying for here
- By John S. on 08-17-11
By: Oliver Sacks
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The Mind's Eye
- By: Oliver Sacks
- Narrated by: Oliver Sacks, Richard Davidson
- Length: 8 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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An exploration of vision through the case histories of six individuals - including a renowned pianist who continues to give concerts despite losing the ability to read the score, and a neurobiologist born with crossed eyes who, late in life, suddenly acquires binocular vision, and how her brain adapts to that new skill.
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Same ole Sacks--great yarns as usual.
- By Rlelli07 on 10-26-10
By: Oliver Sacks
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Migraine
- By: Oliver Sacks
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 12 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Dr. Oliver Sacks argues the migraine cannot be understood simply as an illness, but must be viewed as a complex condition with a unique role to play in each individual's life.
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Why is this an audio book?
- By BW724 on 06-25-19
By: Oliver Sacks
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The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: and Other Clinical Tales
- By: Oliver Sacks
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis, Oliver Sacks - introduction
- Length: 9 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Oliver Sacks' The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat tells the stories of individuals afflicted with fantastic perceptual and intellectual aberrations: patients who have lost their memories and with them the greater part of their pasts; who are no longer able to recognize people and common objects; who are stricken with violent tics and grimaces or who shout involuntary obscenities; whose limbs have become alien; who have been dismissed as retarded yet are gifted with uncanny artistic or mathematical talents.
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I rarely stop reading a book halfway through...
- By Rusty on 09-04-15
By: Oliver Sacks
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And How Are You, Dr. Sacks?
- A Biographical Memoir of Oliver Sacks
- By: Lawrence Weschler
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 14 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Lawrence Weschler sets Oliver Sacks' brilliant table talk and extravagant personality in vivid relief, casting himself as a beanpole Sancho to Sacks' 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.
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Excellent and Exceptional
- By KK on 10-19-19
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Uncle Tungsten
- Memories of a Chemical Boyhood
- By: Oliver Sacks
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 10 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Long before Oliver Sacks became a distinguished neurologist and best-selling writer, he was a small English boy fascinated by metals - also by chemical reactions (the louder and smellier the better), photography, squids and cuttlefish, H.G. Wells, and the periodic table. In this endlessly charming and eloquent memoir, the he chronicles his love affair with science and the magnificently odd and sometimes harrowing childhood in which that love affair unfolded.
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FOR COMMITED LOVERS OF OLIVER SACKS WORK
- By Jeff on 05-02-12
By: Oliver Sacks
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Weathering
- How the earth's deep wisdom can help us endure life's storms
- By: Ruth Allen
- Narrated by: Ruth Allen
- Length: 8 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Rocks and mountains have withstood aeons of life on our planet - gradually eroding, dissolving, recycling, shifting, solidifying, and weathering. We might spend a little less time on earth, but humans are also weathering: evolving and changing as we're transformed by the shifting climates of our lives and experiences. So, what might these ancient natural forms have to teach us about resilience and change?
By: Ruth Allen
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Health and Safety
- A Breakdown
- By: Emily Witt
- Narrated by: Emily Witt
- Length: 9 hrs
- Unabridged
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In the summer of 2016, a divisive presidential election was underway, and a new breed of right-wing rage was on the rise. Emily Witt, who would soon publish her first book on sex in the digital age, had recently quit antidepressants for a more expansive world of psychedelic experimentation. From her apartment in Brooklyn, she began to catch glimpses of the clandestine nightlife scene thrumming around her.
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Bored voice
- By Amazon Customer on 12-20-24
By: Emily Witt
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Oaxaca Journal
- By: Oliver Sacks
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis, Oliver Sacks - introduction
- Length: 4 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Oliver Sacks is well known as an explorer of the human mind - a neurologist with a gift for complex, insightful portrayals of people and their conditions. However, he is also a card-carrying member of the American Fern Society, and since childhood has been fascinated by these primitive plants and their ability to survive and adapt in many climates. Oaxaca Journal is Sacks' spellbinding account of his trip with a group of fellow fern enthusiasts to the beautiful, history-steeped province of Oaxaca, Mexico.
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A gem
- By Daniela on 06-04-15
By: Oliver Sacks
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The Black Utopians
- Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America
- By: Aaron Robertson
- Narrated by: Dion Graham
- Length: 10 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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How do the disillusioned, the forgotten, and the persecuted not merely hold on to life but expand its possibilities and preserve its beauty? What, in other words, does utopia look like in black? These questions animate Aaron Robertson’s exploration of Black Americans' efforts to remake the conditions of their lives. Writing in the tradition of Saidiya Hartman and Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robertson makes his way from his ancestral hometown of Promise Land, Tennessee, to Detroit—the city where he was born, and where one of the country’s most remarkable Black utopian experiments got its start.
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Powerful & Provoking
- By Vann Tee on 03-20-25
By: Aaron Robertson
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Life as No One Knows It
- The Physics of Life's Emergence
- By: Sara Imari Walker
- Narrated by: Sara Imari Walker
- Length: 7 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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What is life? This is among the most difficult open problems in science, right up there with the nature of consciousness and the existence of matter. All the definitions we have fall short. None help us understand how life originates or the full range of possibilities for what life on other planets might look like. In Life as No One Knows It, physicist and astrobiologist Sara Imari Walker argues that solving the origin of life requires radical new thinking and an experimentally testable theory for what life is.
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Fascinating thought patterns
- By John linden on 09-10-24
What listeners say about Letters
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Adriana D. Briscoe
- 01-13-25
Beautiful letters by a beautiful mind
Extremely grateful to have gotten more of a glimpse of this extraordinary man’s mind. Great to know he was thinking about the evolution of eyes and other Darwinian themes in the end.
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- Brandy
- 01-09-25
Too Much
While Oliver Sacks was a remarkable man who accomplished much in his life, this collection of his letters was way too long. The compiler of this tome did little to cull the collection leaving the reader/listener to plow through way too much information. I would have enjoyed it far more if she had narrowed the collection to at least half of what is contained in the book and left those letters that help paint a portrait of the man.
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