The periodic table in Oliver Sacks’ wallet.

May 2, 2021 / Kate Edgar / News

Dear Friends,

Oliver Sacks was prolific. Besides 16 published books, he also left behind a legacy of brilliant essays, lectures, unpublished drafts, journals, letters, notes, marginalia, audio recordings, film, and more. Part of the Foundation’s work in the six years since he passed has been to gather, digitize, and share as much of that body of work as possible.

Last year, Oliver’s partner Bill Hayes invited us to visit his apartment and photograph some of the small, unassuming items that filled Oliver’s life.

One of the items we found most fascinating was Oliver’s wallet, with his New York driver’s license and other cards still inside. Where most people keep their photo ID, Oliver kept a small card printed with the periodic table of elements.

During filming for the Ric Burns documentary, he spoke about why he did this:

“Oh, I carry a periodic table in my wallet. I love it very much. It stands for order, stability – but it also stands for imagination and mystery. And some of the elements get very, very complicated, as you go above 92 and sort of relativistic and other considerations come in. For example, you cannot understand, on the basis of the periodic table, why gold is gold. It’s a very simple question. In fact, it turns out to be a very deep question. And I am not mathematical enough to tell you the answer. But it involves both quantum physics and relativity.”

Snippets like these, windows into Oliver Sacks’ life and mind, can be found all throughout “Oliver Sacks: His Own Mind.” It explores sides of Oliver that don’t show up in his books, and gives a moving, intimate look into the way he moved through the world. The documentary is available for free streaming through PBS American Masters through May 8, and if you give it a watch we’d love to hear what you think.

Thank you for all of your great comments on our social media channels, and replies to this newsletter—we love hearing from you!

Sincerely,

Kate, Greg, and Abi

Radiolab’s Robert Krulwich, Oliver Sacks documentary on PBS American Masters

April 8, 2021 / Kate Edgar / News

Dear Friends,

We are delighted to announce that Ric Burns’ documentary Oliver Sacks: His Own Life will be broadcast throughout the United States on PBS’ American Masters, premiering at 9 p.m. EDT on Friday, April 9th. (Check your local listings for additional times.) This award-winning film will also be available to stream online for free from April 9th through May 7th. For more information, please visit pbs.org/oliversacks.

To learn more about Dr. Sacks and the making of the film, you can also join us for a special 92Y online conversation on Tuesday, March 30 at 7 p.m. EDT. Hosted by journalist Jenna Flanagan, the discussion will include film director Ric Burns, Sacks Foundation director Kate Edgar, Radiolab’s Robert Krulwich, and neurologist Blanca Valdovinos of the University of Rochester Medical Center. We’ll show you preview clips from the film and share plenty of behind-the-scenes stories. Register for free here.

For our friends in France and Germany: Oliver Sacks: His Own Life is now available to stream online on Arte! For other international dates and events, visit oliversacksdoc.com/international.

Wishing you and yours all the sweetness, color, and energy of spring!

The Sacks Team

(Photo by Bill Hayes)

“We are not given the world: we make our world”

January 13, 2021 / Kate Edgar / News

Dear Friends,

Happy New Year! ¡Feliz Año Nuevo!

We are delighted to announce that Ric Burns’ film Oliver Sacks: His Own Life is now available for streaming in the U.S. on iTunes, Amazon, Vudu, and Google Play.

To everyone who made the effort to watch the documentary last year, thank you—your support made the film the number one release for 2020 on Kino Now’s virtual cinema platform! Australian audiences were lucky enough to see the film in physical cinemas throughout December, and the Australian Book Review called it “a poignant portrait of a lyrical neurologist” and a “very satisfying two hours spent with a fascinating and inspiring figure.”

To our friends in Spain: Oliver Sacks: His Own Life and Awakenings are both screening now via the digital streaming platform Filmin. For other international dates and events, visit oliversacksdoc.com.

As we enter this new year we are mindful of these words from Dr. Sacks: “We are not given the world: we make our world through incessant experience, categorization, memory, reconnection.” They remind us of the power each of us has to shape the world we live in. We wish you a new year full of reconnections and new experiences. Above all, please stay healthy!

The Sacks Team

P.S. In case you missed it, be sure to watch this short Tribeca Talks which features Robert De Niro, Walter Parkes, Ric Burns and Kate Edgar reminiscing about the making of Awakenings.

Happy holidays from the Oliver Sacks Foundation!

January 5, 2021 / Kate Edgar / News

Dear Friends,

We wish you a very peaceful, healthy holiday season. Among the other things we have to celebrate at this time of year, this week marks the 30th anniversary of the 1990 film Awakenings, directed by Penny Marshall, and starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams. The film was the beginning of a lifelong friendship between Oliver Sacks and Robin Williams – the photo below shows them playing Santa for a fundraiser in the early 1990s.

Awakenings was nominated for three Academy Awards, and watching it again this week, we were reminded of how beautiful the sets and cinematography are, and how very movingly the Awakenings patients’ stories are told. And if you watch closely, you will spot many other extraordinary actors, including John Heard, Ann Meara, Judith Malina, Julie Kavner, Bradley Whitford, and the great Dexter Gordon.

As a special anniversary celebration, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment is making Awakenings available online along with Ric Burns’ documentary Oliver Sacks: His Own Life, courtesy of Zeitgeist/Kino Lorber. Both films will be available to watch online for free from December 26 through 29th. Viewings will be limited to the first 500 people to register here.

At 1 pm EST on Monday December 28th, you can tune in to Tribeca Talks via this link to see a discussion of both films featuring Robert De Niro, renowned producer Walter Parkes, director Ric Burns, and Kate Edgar of the Oliver Sacks Foundation. We will reminisce about the making of both films, about Robin Williams, Oliver Sacks, and much more. Grab your popcorn!

Warm wishes,

The Sacks Team

AWAKENINGS is also available for rental on a number of streaming services, including Hulu, Amazon Prime, Starz, and Vudu.

OLIVER SACKS: HIS OWN LIFE is also available for purchase or rental at Kino Now (check out their great catalog of indie films!).

“My predominant feeling is one of gratitude”

December 3, 2020 / Kate Edgar / News

Dear friends,

Any time we ask you all about your favorite Oliver Sacks quotes, there’s one excerpt that comes up again and again, a section of one of the essays included in Gratitude:

“I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.

Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.”

As we near the end of a turbulent and challenging year, we’re using the holidays as an excuse to remember what we’re thankful for, and Dr. Sacks’s essays on what it means to live a good and worthwhile life are always helpful for putting things into perspective. We’ve put together a small gift guide, below, for Oliver Sacks books that might make sense for the people on your list this year. And don’t forget to shop early and shop indie! Local bookstores need our support this year more than ever.

Musicophilia – For The Music Lover

“Music can pierce the heart directly; it needs no mediation.” Indeed, music occupies more areas of our brain than language does–humans are a musical species. In Musicophilia, Sacks describes how music can animate people with Parkinson’s disease who cannot otherwise move, give words to stroke patients who cannot otherwise speak, and calm and organize people whose memories are ravaged by Alzheimer’s or amnesia.

An Anthropologist on Mars – For The Curious Empath

In the seven stories of this collection, Dr. Sacks focuses less on clinical diagnosis and more on painting a picture of how various neurological diseases impact the complicated wholeness of a human life. Anyone with an avid curiosity and an interest in shared human experience will be gripped by the exploration of these individual lives, from an artist who loses all sense of color in a car accident to a surgeon consumed by the compulsive tics of Tourette’s Syndrome.

On the Move – For The Armchair Traveller

If you know someone who’s feeling cooped up in quarantine, help them explore the world and get a taste of adventure with Oliver Sacks’s memoir, as he recounts his obsession with motorcycles; his love affairs, both romantic and intellectual; his experiences as a young neurologist in the early 1960s, first in California and then in New York; and his struggles with his own sexuality and drug addiction.

Gratitude – For The Person Who Needs Encouragement

No writer has succeeded in capturing the medical and human drama of illness as honestly and eloquently as Oliver Sacks. During the last few months of his life, he wrote a set of essays exploring his feelings about completing a life and coming to terms with his own death. This is the perfect gift for anyone who could use a reminder of how much joy and wonder the world contains, even now.

We’re also excited to share that Oliver Sacks: His Own Life is now available nationwide on Kino Now – buy or rent it and watch it from home tonight! It’s the perfect uplifting documentary for the whole family to watch together over the holidays, whether you’re watching it in the same living room or across the country from each other.

We’re grateful for the work of Oliver Sacks, we’re grateful for healthcare workers, and we’re grateful for all of you. We hope you’re finding ways to stay safe and happy this holiday season.

Cheers,

Kate, Greg, and Abi

A book, a film, and a voting plan

September 15, 2020 / Kate Edgar / News

Dear Readers,

Is it autumn so soon? We have so much news to catch up on!

First off, we are delighted to announce a new edition of Oliver Sacks’s third book (originally published in 1984), A LEG TO STAND ON, with a new foreword by Kate Edgar, his longtime editor. In this book, Dr. Sacks, following a mountaineering accident, becomes a patient himself, and examines profound issues of injury, recovery, and body image. It is deeply personal and perhaps his most poetic foray into questions of health and patienthood.

We are excited, too, to announce that Ric Burns’s “tender and thrilling” documentary OLIVER SACKS: HIS OWN LIFE will be available for viewing from 9/23 via a COVID-compliant virtual theatrical release. Translation: Since theaters were unable to debut the film in May, crafty minds at Zeitgeist Films have engineered a way for you to buy tickets through your local cinema that enables you to rent the film for five days online—all for the price of a single cinema ticket!

So you can support your local cinema and see the movie in the comfort of your own home. Many of your local cinemas will also be offering online Q&As and other special events, so be sure to visit the film’s website for latest updates. And stay tuned to our Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for updates.

A special note to all of our friends and followers in the U.S.:

As all of you know, Oliver Sacks was deeply concerned not only with humanity’s ability to survive and respect each other’s differences, but with the health of our planet and all of its creatures. He was fiercely supportive of the Black Lives Matter movement from its earliest days, as his partner, Bill Hayes, has written about.

If you are a citizen of the U.S., or know someone who is: IT’S TIME TO ACTIVATE YOUR VOTING PLAN. Make sure your vote counts by casting it as soon as you can. For state by state info, visit vote411.org.

And while we’re on the topic of caring for yourself, your neighbors, and your future, have you filled out your 2020 census yet? Go to my2020census.gov. This will affect how much federal funding your community is entitled to, as well as how many representatives and votes you have in the U.S. Congress for the next ten years.

Thank you, be well, and stay strong,

The Oliver Sacks Foundation Team

A Less Remembered Pandemic

April 17, 2020 / Kate Edgar / News

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.

A Botanical End-of-Year Message From the Sacks Team

December 21, 2019 / Kate Edgar / News

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

Watch a Clip From the Oliver Sacks Documentary

September 25, 2019 / Kate Edgar / News

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

Contribute to an Oliver Sacks Biography!

July 9, 2019 / Kate Edgar / News

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@www.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

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