Dear Readers, We hope you are staying healthy and safe in these extremely difficult times. Reading, as we all are, about the spread of Covid-19 inevitably reminds us of the flu pandemic of 1917-18, which killed millions around the globe. Less well remembered is another pandemic, the “sleepy sickness” or encephalitis lethargica, which raged from 1917 to 1927, killing or incapacitating some five million people. In Awakenings, Dr. Sacks writes of encountering a number of sleepy sickness survivors, so-called post-encephalitics, in the late 1960s, some forty years after their initial illness. In the Bronx hospital where he cared for these people, he discovered “a new bond: that of commitment to the patients, the individuals under my care. Through them I would explore what it was like to be human, to stay human, in the face of unimaginable adversities and threats. … The intensity of feeling for these patients … bound us together as a community.”   He paid tribute to the many other healthcare providers who “also dedicated themselves, spent countless hours in the hospital. All of us involved with the patients—nurses, social workers, therapists of every sort—were in constant communication: talking to each other in the passage, phoning each other on weekends and at night, constantly exchanging new experiences and ideas.”]   Above all, Sacks’s remarkable experiences with his patients taught him that each one was an individual, and that all would adapt to or surmount their illness in very individual ways. As we are all tested to the limit by Covid-19, let us be grateful to the incredible healthcare workers on our frontlines, and let us cherish each other, and our individualities, all the more closely. In solidarity, Kate Edgar

Other Updates

Watch the free webcast of City Arts & Lectures’ “Remembering Oliver Sacks,” a panel discussion with Steve Silberman, the author of NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity; Temple Grandin, author of Thinking in Pictures and Animals in Translation; and Kate Edgar, Oliver Sacks’s editor, researcher, assistant and friend.

The panel will take place Friday, April 17th at 7:30 PM PT. Immediately after that, it will be available on the City Arts & Lectures’ website and YouTube.

Ric Burns’s extraordinary documentary, Oliver Sacks: His Own Life, illuminates the life and work of Dr. Sacks, including the many years he spent with his Awakenings patients. Due to Covid-19, the theatrical release of the film has been delayed. You can find updates when available here.

If you’re looking for a quarantine read, Everything in Its Place is now available in paperback. This final volume of essays showcases Dr. 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.

Hello friends, Dr. Sacks would be thrilled to know that a newly identified species of fern has been named Ceradenia sacksii, “Sacks’ waxy-gland fern” by botanist Michael Sundue. This is a tremendous honor—thank you, Michael!

Photo by Michael Sundue.

Sundue, a member of the American Fern Society, features in Sacks’s essay “Botanists on Park,” a chapter in Everything in Its Place. Elsewhere in that book, Dr. Sacks describes his love for nature. “I have seen in my patients,” he writes, “the restorative and healing powers of nature and gardens, even for those who are deeply disabled neurologically. In many cases, gardens and nature are more powerful than any medication.” As a writer, he found gardens essential to the creative process. And so, we dedicate this year-end newsletter to a number of books by wonderful botanist-writers.

If you haven’t yet discovered the books of William Bryant Logan, you are in for a treat that will nourish your spirit. Try Oak: The Frame of Civilization; Air: The Restless Shaper of the World; Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth, or his new book, Sprout Lands: Tending the Endless Gift of Trees. Peter Wohlleben, author of The Hidden Life of Trees, says: “William Bryant Logan’s vision of a world in which humans and trees work together to mutual benefit — a world that has existed in the past and can exist again in the future — is cause for deep joy, for celebration and hope.”

We also love Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, which has drawn kudos from Jane Goodall, Elizabeth Gilbert, and Krista Tippett. Publishers Weekly calls her a mesmerizing storyteller, who “shares legends from her Potawatomi ancestors to illustrate the culture of gratitude in which we all should live.”

Did you know that Oliver Sacks dedicated a whole book to ferns and botany? Oaxaca Journal is his ode to ferns: an ancient class of plants able to survive and adapt in many climates. Along with a group of fellow fern aficionados, he embarks on an exploration of southern Mexico, a region also rich in human history and culture. In his account of their travels, he muses on the origins of chocolate and mescal, pre-Columbian culture and hallucinogens, and the peculiar passions of botanists.

Our friends at Book Post write, “This splendidly nerdy cohort is nothing if not inclusive, their one adhesive being a resounding passion for the fern; knowledge and discovery are for them a revelatory joy rather than a field of competition.”

Trying to reduce your gift-giving footprint? Please consider donating to your favorite environmental causes in honor of a friend or loved one. There are thousands of organizations helping to make a sustainable Earth. Some of these work internationally, like Conservation International, Friends of the Earth, 350.org, NRDC, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Sierra Club—while others focus on local action. All of them need our support now more than ever.

Wishing you the peace of nature and the warmth of friends during this holiday season, The Sacks Team

We are very excited to announce that Oliver Sacks: His Own Life, a Ric Burns documentary on the life and work of Oliver Sacks,  premiered last week at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado. It will be screened again on September 30th, October 3rd, and October 13th at the 57th New York Film Festival. We expect these sessions to sell out very quickly, so if you’re interested in attending we recommend that you buy your tickets as soon as possible. You can watch an exclusive clip of the film on our Facebook page.

In January 2015, a few weeks after completing his autobiographical memoir On the Move, Oliver Sacks learned that the rare form of cancer for which he had been treated nine years earlier had returned and that he had only a few months to live. A few weeks later, he sat down with director Ric Burns for a series of marathon filmed interviews in his apartment in New York. For eighty hours, across five days in February and on three more occasions in April and June – surrounded by family and friends, books and minerals, notebooks from six decades of thinking and writing about the brain –he talked about his life and work, his dreams and fears, his abiding sense of wonder at the natural world, and the place of human beings within it. He spoke with astonishing candor and clear-sightedness, a profoundly gifted 81-year-old man facing death with remarkable courage and vitality. He was determined to come to grips with what his life had meant and what it means to be, as he put it, “a sentient being on this beautiful planet.” Drawing on these riveting and profoundly moving reflections, ​Oliver Sacks: His Own Life also features nearly two dozen deeply revealing and personal interviews with family members, colleagues, patients and close friends, including Jonathan Miller, Robert Silvers, Temple Grandin, Christof Koch, Robert Krulwich, Lawrence Weschler, Roberto Calasso, Paul Theroux, Isabelle Rapin, Billy Hayes, Kate Edgar, Mark Homonoff, Jonathan Sacks, Steve Silberman, Shane Fistell, Atul Gawande, and Lowell Handler, among others. The film also draws on unique access to the extensive archives of the Oliver Sacks Foundation. It is in part the biography of an extraordinary physician and writer who was dogged by his own neuroses and by the rejection of his medical colleagues but nonetheless redefined for millions of readers the nature of the human mind, through the simple act of telling profoundly compassionate stories. It is also a deeply illuminating exploration of the science of human consciousness and the nature of subjectivity, and a meditation on the deep and intimate relation between art and science and storytelling. Tickets for the New York Film Festival are on sale now! We hope you will join us. For those not able to make it to one of these screenings, stay tuned for further information on how you can see this extraordinary film celebrating the life of Oliver Sacks. #OliverSacksMovie // OliverSacksMovie.com

In Other News

September is Alzheimer’s Awareness Month. A study in The Journal of Prevention of Alzheimer’s Disease found that memories of music cannot be lost to Alzheimer’s and dementia, and that playing music often brings Alzheimer’s patients back to a temporary lucidity.

In Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks said “for many of my neurological patients, music can provide access, even when no medication can, to movement, to speech, to life. For them, music is not a luxury, but a necessity.”

September is also National Deaf Awareness Month. In this PBS NewsHour feature, Oliver Sacks talks about the Deaf President Now protest that took place in 1988 at Gallaudet University, a Washington D.C. school for the deaf and hard of hearing.

The protest kicked off when the Board of Trustees appointed a hearing person as the school’s president, instead of one of the highly qualified Deaf candidates. Students kept the campus shut down for a week, and the protest only ended with the appointment of I. King Jordan, the university’s first deaf president.

Kind regards, The Sacks Team

 

Dear readers,

Happy July 9th (the 86th anniversary of Oliver Sacks’s birth)! We are very excited to announce that Laura J. Snyder has begun working on the definitive biography of Oliver Sacks! Follow her on Twitter for progress updates. With exclusive access to Dr. Sacks’s vast archive of manuscripts, journals, correspondence, and photographs, Dr. Snyder has already unearthed some interesting surprises, including OWS’s notebook from his expedition to the Marine Research Station at Millport, Scotland in April-May 1950, when he was at St. Paul’s School. It could be considered his first “professional” field notebook.

 

Oliver greatly admired Laura Snyder’s books, calling her “a masterly scholar and a powerful storyteller.” Her most recent book, Eye of the Beholder, explored how artists and scientists in seventeenth-century Holland changed the way we see the world. We suspect she will also have many fascinating new perspectives on how Oliver Sacks interacted with the science and culture of his own times.

We invite you to add your own stories and reflections to our archive: How did Oliver Sacks and his work affect your life? Did you know Dr. Sacks personally, or correspond with him?

We’d love to hear your stories and reflections. You can reply to this email, or write to biography@oliversacks.com.

Everything in Its Place was recently the subject of a very insightful essay by Simon Callow in the New York Review of Books.

Have you seen Oliver Sacks’s reading list, from the Strand Bookstore’s Author Bookshelf?

And finally, if you are near London, you will want to visit this remarkable new exhibition on codes, ciphers, and cyber security at the Science Museum in Kensington (yes, one of the magnificent museums that entranced the young Oliver Sacks, as he writes about in Everything in Its Place).

Cheers, The Sacks Team

 

Did you know that Oliver Sacks once bought a house during a swim around New York’s City Island? He lived there for over twenty years.

In his upcoming essay collection Everything In Its Place, Dr. Sacks recalls, “I had stopped about halfway around to look at a charming gazebo by the water’s edge, got out and strolled up the street, saw a little red house for sale, was shown round it (still dripping) by the puzzled owners, walked along to the real estate agent and convinced her of my interest (she was not used to customers in swim trunks), reentered the water on the other side of the island, and swam back to Orchard Beach, having acquired a house in midswim.”

Everything In Its Place goes on sale on April 23. Preorder your copy from your favorite bookseller here. In a prepublication review, The Scientist says: “We readers can rejoice that, while cancer may have claimed his body, his voice continues to ring out… His agility with the microscope of prose—zooming in on acute scenes from his own life, then back out to encapsulate life and science as a whole—is in full flourish in [this] latest book.”

 

Have you read Maria Popova’s beautiful new book ‘Figuring’? It explores creativity, love, humanity, and science through the interconnected lives of artists, writers, and scientists across four centuries, from Johannes Kepler to Margaret Fuller, who sparked the feminist movement in the nineteenth century, to Rachel Carson, who launched modern environmentalism with her classic book Silent Spring.

 

April is Parkinson’s Awareness Month. More than 10 million people worldwide have Parkinson’s Disease. Though we cannot yet cure it, researchers have found many ways to slow the disease’s progression—from new medications to virtual reality to intense exercise. Watch 60 Second Docs’ video about Scott Newman’s rigorous training program for people with PD here.

 

Kind regards,
The Sacks Team

Please consider supporting the nonprofit Oliver Sacks Foundation. Thank you.

Everything in Its Place, the final collection of essays by Oliver Sacks, will be available on April 23, 2019.

Publishers Weekly calls it “a treat for the chronically curious.”

They write: “In this lovely collection of previously unpublished essays, the late, celebrated author and neurologist Oliver Sacks muses on his career, his youth, the mental health field, and much more. . . .”

“Sacks’s gentle, ruminative voice is a salve when investigating difficult subject matter, but there are plenty of lighter moments as well. . . . Piercingly insightful and delightfully strange, Sacks’ final collection is a treat for the chronically curious.”

 

An early excerpt from the book, in which Dr. Sacks writes about the neurological effects of our digital devices, appears in The New Yorker’s February 11, 2019 issue. Another excerpt, about Alzheimer’s and identity, will be in the New Yorker’s March 4 issue (available February 25).

 

We’ve been finding lots of intriguing journals, photos, and letters in Dr. Sacks’s huge archive, and we will be sharing some of these with you on our social media, including our new Instagram account. Follow us for updates on new projects, photos from the archive, and more.

 

 

Dr. Sacks was recently the subject of a BBC Great Lives program. Hear his partner, Bill Hayes, and neurologist Suzanne O’Sullivan sharing stories of his life and work.

 

 

The Oliver Sacks Foundation is dedicated to honoring and continuing the legacy of Dr. Oliver Sacks and reducing the stigma of mental and neurological illness. We thank you for your support.

Best wishes from The Sacks Team!

 

We are proud to announce a final collection of essays–many never before published, coming your way on April 23, 2019! Everything in Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales, showcases Dr. Sacks’s broad range of interests, from his passion for ferns, swimming, and ginkgoes, to his final case histories exploring schizophrenia, dementia, and Alzheimer’s. You can pre-order a copy now from your favorite bookseller.

And The River of Consciousness is now available in paperback, with a gorgeous new cover.

 

“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

Happy holidays from the Oliver Sacks Foundation!

 

Oliver loved to celebrate his birthday, July 9. He would start the day with a swim, and then we would round up the usual suspects and throw a party with lots of smoked fish and bagels.

He often thought of numbers as their corresponding chemical elements (see “My Periodic Table,” in his book Gratitude), and in the photo here, he celebrates his 80^th birthday by wearing a mercury t-shirt.

Today Oliver would have been … ASTATINE (85)!

We don’t know what astatine would look like: it’s highly radioactive, and its half-life is so brief it’s impossible to get a pure sample of this evanescent  element.

Speaking of time vanishing, please check out the links below to find out more about The Animated Mind of Oliver Sacks. Let’s show Oliver some love today and make this film a reality!

Happy July 9th!

Oliver Sacks’s animated mind is becoming an animated film, and we hope you will be a part of it!

Dempsey Rice, the filmmaker who brought us so many fascinating interviews with Dr. Sacks over the last decade of his life (see some on our YouTube channel), is creating a gorgeous, fun, inspiring feature-length film that delves into his life and mind. We have been lucky enough to see a preview of her project and have fallen in love with it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Go to Dempsey’s Kickstarter page for a preview and to check out the cool OS swag there—think private screenings, cephalopod love, Sacks tote bags, autographed books, and the coffee mug you must have.

 

Please share this Kickstarter campaign with your friends

Twitter

Facebook

Instagram

 

This campaign will last only a month, and early contributions are vital.

 

We can’t wait to see Dempsey’s film! Thank you for helping to make it a reality.

 

How we wish Dr. Sacks were still alive to see the glorious reviews for his new book, The River of Consciousness. In this week’s New York Times Book Review, Nicole Krauss writes:

“In his more than 45 years of writing books . . . Sacks taught us much about how we think, remember, and perceive, about how we shape our sense of the world and ourselves. His case studies of those with neurological disorders were works of literature even while they broke scientific ground. . . . The River of Consciousness, a collection of essays he worked on until his death, contains reflections on the evolution of life and the evolution of ideas, on the workings of memory, the process of consciousness, and the nature of creativity, alongside examinations of his own mishearings and misrememberings and his experience of illness.”

Everything he wrote, she continues, was infused with a “combination of wonder, passion and gratitude [that] never seemed to flag in Sacks’s life. . . . 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.”

We send you warmest wishes for the holidays, and hope that, in the spirit of gratitude and change, you will consider giving to your favorite nonprofit organizations. Some of Dr. Sacks’s favorites were the New York Botanical Garden, Conservation International, Doctors Without Borders, Fountain House, CooperRiis, the National Aphasia Association, and the Tourette Syndrome Association. Should you wish to directly support the work of the Oliver Sacks Foundation, your contribution will help us further the cause of narrative and humanist medicine.

The River of Consciousness is available in e-book, audio, and hardcover formats. Translations so far are available in Germany, the Netherlands, Brasil, and Portugal, with many other languages coming soon!

We are grateful for your support.

Best wishes from
The Oliver Sacks Foundation