Foreword
Darwin and the Meaning of Flowers
Speed
Sentience: The Mental Lives of Plants and Worms
The Other Road: Freud as Neurologist
The Fallibility of Memory
Mishearings
The Creative Self
A General Feeling of Disorder
The River of Consciousness
Scotoma: Forgetting and Neglect in Science
Bibliography
Index
OLIVER SACKS was born in 1933 in London and was educated at
Queen's College, Oxford. He completed his medical training at San
Francisco's Mount Zion Hospital and at UCLA before moving to New
York.
Familiar to the readers of The New Yorker and The New York Review
of Books, Dr. Sacks spent more than fifty years working as a
neurologist and wrote many books, including The Man Who Mistook His
Wife for a Hat, Musicophilia, and Hallucinations, about the strange
neurological predicaments and conditions of his patients. The New
York Times referred to him as "the poet laureate of medicine," and
over the years he received many awards, including honors from the
Guggenheim Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the
American Academy of Arts and Letters, The American Academy of Arts
and Sciences, and the Royal College of Physicians. His memoir On
the Move was published shortly before his death in August 2015.
“Oliver Sacks knew how much his readers would miss him, and he
outlined these ten essays before he left us. Indeed, blessed are we
who mourn. His was a voice that could untangle even the most
formidable knots of medical mystery—the bewildering maladies of the
brain—and roll them out into smooth ribbons of human story. I read
these essays in one night, spellbound as he described petals,
cameras, bombs—and, of course, neurons—so enraptured with details
that only later did I realize how he had also explained the
weightiness of time, memory, and learning itself. The River of
Consciousness is the precious voice of Oliver Sacks come back to
us, to do what all great seers do: lead us to places that we could
never have found on our own.” —Hope Jahren, author of Lab Girl
“Reading a book published after its authors death, especially if he
is as prodigiously alive on every page as Oliver Sacks, as curious,
avid and thrillingly fluent, brings both the joy of hearing from
him again, and the regret of knowing it will likely be the last
time…[The] combination of wonder, passion and gratitude never
seemed to flag in Sacks’s life; everything he wrote was lit with
it. But it was his openness to new ideas and experiences, and his
vision of change as the most human of biological processes, that
synthesized all of his work.” —Nicole Krauss, The New York Times
Book Review
“Reveals Sacks as a gleeful polymath and an inveterate seeker of
meaning in the mold of Darwin and his other scientific heroes
Sigmund Freud and William James….As this volume reminds us, in
losing Sacks we lost a gifted and generous storyteller.” —Wall
Street Journal
“The reader is in thrall to Sacks’ ability to braid wide reading,
research and experience with his neurology patients to reach
original and subtle conclusions….Sacks is the expression of…mental
agility, a mind at play in the world.” —Chicago Tribune
“The warm genius of Oliver Sacks comes alive as he tackles
everything from memory to Freud’s little-known contributions to
neurology and Darwin’s love of flowers to the nature of
creativity….Sacks brings the friendly curiosity for which he is so
beloved to this ultimate testing ground of character, emerging once
more as the brilliant, lovable human he was.” —Maria Popova,
Brainpickings
“Sacks’s intellectual trajectories are eloquent, witty and adherent
to a sturdy internal logic. He troubles the frontiers of all
creatures and things until the world feels more alive in its
entirety. True to its title, the book is dictated by a flood of
mental energy, thus it is more than mere sentimentality to say
that, more than two years after his death, Sacks’s spirit still
courses through us. Long may it flow.” —The Globe and Mail
“Charming and informative….What really unifies “The River of
Consciousness” is the unique combination of intellectual rigor and
childlike amazement, of bookishness and warmth, which characterizes
all of Sacks’s writing. Which other writer who employs footnotes so
liberally also so often inspires laughter and tears?” —The Boston
Globe
“An immensely satisfying volume that can be read by newcomers as an
introduction to the work of an author of unusual breadth of
knowledge, and equally by aficionados as the final scintillation of
one of the most invigorating and appealing writers of recent
decades….A joy to read: a delicious supply of information and
commentary organized by a gifted writer of a curious and humane
intelligence.” —The Washington Times
“A collection that serves as a valedictory, as well as a useful
introduction to [Sacks’s] restless intellect and elegant sentences
and a tribute to his scientific and philosophical heroes: Darwin,
Freud and William James.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“The author’s unconventional points of view are potentially the
most informative part of the work. He examines well-known ideas
from lesser-known angles—for instance, that Darwin was also a
botanist and supported his theory with botanical experimentation.
Throughout, Sacks displays his marvelous skill with words, rich
knowledge of medicine and science and their histories,
observational skills, curiosity, and humor, and it’s impossible not
to feel the loss of this amazing thinker….Every reader should be
able to find something to enjoy and appreciate here.” —Library
Journal *starred review*
“Sacks engages and deepens our attention through the historic and
personal particulars with which he argues his points about what,
say, memory, or forgetting, or creativity, or ‘A General Feeling of
Disorder,’ involves organismically. So doing, he has made permanent
contributions to literature.” —Booklist
“The book is a tribute to [Sacks’s] appreciation of all that’s
beautifully complex in humans….Readers will feel a similar sense of
gratitude for the extraordinary work that Sacks left behind.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Sacks’s enthusiasms are so finely and conversationally expressed
as to be entirely seductive….Each essay contains a careful lifetime
of observation and reading….A marvellous discrete series of
meditations—and a profoundly moving one.” —The Observer
“The essays share a few common themes, the most prominent
being the seemingly instinctive drive to understand ourselves and
the world around us. Science, Sacks suggests, traces its origins
directly to that impulse—a curiosity that encourages us to lean in
and observe something closely….It’s an infectious state of mind,
and readers will likely look at the world around them differently
after finishing The River of Consciousness.” —Richmond
Times-Dispatch
“Compelling….The experience of reading the essays that make
up The River of Consciousness is very much like peering
into an ever-changing stream. Pebbles shift as the water courses
by, revealing unexpected facets below….By bringing these quirky,
personal and curious essays together, Sacks invites readers into
his mind where they can experience the world from his unusually
insightful perspective.” —Science News Magazine
“An incisive and generous inquiry into human nature.” —Elle.com
“Sacks’s sharp intellect and observations, and passion for
knowledge, shine through.” —Buzzfeed
“Fans of the late neurologist have another chance to enjoy this
erudite, compassionate storyteller, essayist, and memoirist in what
may be his final work. This collection of 10 essays, some of which
appeared previously in the New York Review of Books, was assembled
by three colleagues from an outline provided by Sacks two weeks
before his death in 2015….A collection of dissimilar pieces that
reveal the scope of the author’s interests—sometimes challenging,
always rewarding.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Sacks once again enthralls readers with tantalizing true tales on
everything from evolution and time to creativity and experience.
Thoughtful and captivating, this collection will make you miss the
iconic scholar even more than you already do.” —bustle.com, “11 New
Essays For Your Fireside Reading This Fall”
“Brilliant, beautiful, and funny….Sacks was one of the finest
science writers--well read, scientifically exact and literary….This
collection meets the standard of his previous work….Sacks's love of
the natural world as well as the human one is contagious. The
breadth of his interests encourages his readers to expand their own
horizons….His curiosity and erudition, and his joy in both
intellectual and physical life are in full bloom on these pages.”
—Shelf Awareness
“Sacks continues in this latest collection to focus on questions
over answers; the result is a work that leaves plenty of room for
possibility beyond what might be immediately observed….
Intellectually, Sacks is, at heart, a philosopher. But he is a
philosopher looking not for answers but for increasingly grander
questions. He asked a multitude of them throughout his 82 years,
but ‘what is a mind?’ might be his biggest.” —New York Magazine
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