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

Two weeks before his death in August 2015, Oliver Sacks outlined the contents of The River of Consciousness, the last book he would oversee in detail, and charged three of us—Kate Edgar, Billy Hayes, and Dan Frank (his longtime editor at Knopf)—with arranging its publication.

Though Sacks is best known for the depth of his compassion and ability to address ideas in medicine and neuroscience, he could move fluidly among the issues and ideas of most arts and sciences. That wide-ranging expertise and passion informs this book, in which he ponders the nature not only of human experience but of all life (including botanical life).

In The River of Consciousness, Sacks calls upon his great scientific and creative heroes—above all, Darwin, Freud, and William James. Like Darwin, Sacks was an acute observer and delighted in collecting examples, many of which came from his massive correspondence with patients, colleagues, and you, his readers. Like Freud, he was drawn to understand human behavior at its most enigmatic. And as with James, even when Sacks explores subjects as theoretical as time, memory, and creativity, his attention remains on the specificity of experience.

The River of Consciousness will be published in the UK on October 19 and in the US on October 24, (in hardcover, e-book, and audio editions). Order your copy now, or pay a visit to your local bookstore to reserve a copy!

Also we are pleased to announce two very special live events celebrating the life and work of Oliver Sacks:

San Francisco, Wednesday, November 1, 2017 at 6:30 pm

The Commonwealth Club (110 Embarcadero) will host a discussion with Kate Edgar, Bill Hayes, Victoria Sweet and Steve Silberman. Tickets here. (Use the promo code FRIENDS.)

Books will be on sale at both events.  We hope to see you there!

Last week we lost the legendary, irreplaceable Robert B. Silvers at the age of 87.

In a 2010 interview with New York Magazine, Oliver Sacks was asked, “Who is your favorite New Yorker, living or dead, real or fictional?” He replied, “Bob Silvers, founder and editor of the New York Review of Books, one of the great institutions of intellectual life here or anywhere.”

Bob occupied a unique place in Sacks’s life—as for so many other writers and readers. He was a polymath, equally at home with politics, literature, science, philosophy, and the arts. His respect for his writers was absolute, matched only by his attention to detail and his passion for intellectual discourse. Without Bob Silvers, without the New York Review of Books, the past fifty-plus years would have been a much duller, much less informed place.

He published many of Oliver Sacks’s essays in the pages of the NYRB, including, early on, half a dozen that would become chapters in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.

As an editor, Silvers had a sixth sense about what unexpected topics might intrigue a particular writer. He understood that the simple act of sending one of his writers a book to review might inspire a whole new field of inquiry. It was Silvers’s suggestion that Sacks read on a study of deaf culture and language that ultimately led to his own book Seeing Voices. A few years later, remembering Sacks’s boyhood interest in chemistry, Silvers sent him a biography of Humphry Davy, launching Sacks on his first memoir, Uncle Tungsten.

Two weeks before Dr. Sacks died, in August 2015, he wrote a dedication for the new book he was working on: to Bob Silvers, his editor, mentor, and friend of more than thirty years.

We are very pleased to announce that The River of Consciousness, dedicated to Bob Silvers, will be published in October 2017 (available for preorder now).

Jacket illustration: Felix Vallotton, L’Eure a Pacy-sur-Eure (detail), 1924.

We at the Sacks office are thrilled to share with you some advance praise for Bill Hayes’s gorgeous memoir of his life with Oliver Sacks, Insomniac City, whose official publication date is Valentine’s Day, February 14, 2017. The book is available for pre-order now.

 

Joyce Carol Oates writes: “Insomniac City is a beautiful memoir in which Oliver Sacks comes wonderfully to life–a double portrait that also provides a vivid picture of New York City’s neighborhoods and people. The ending is exquisitely wrought, heartrending and joyous.”

Bill Hayes will be doing readings and book signings in a number of cities, including New York, Washington DC, Berkeley, Seattle, San Francisco, Danville, London, Dublin, and Sydney. For dates and details, visit billhayes.com.

“A beautifully written once-in-a-lifetime book, about love, about life, soul, and the wonderful loving genius Oliver Sacks, and New York, and laughter and all of creation.”
–Anne Lamott, author of  Operating Instructions and  Bird by Bird

“I loved every single sentence in this quiet night-book, erotic and evocative, at once.”
–Terry Tempest Williams, author of  The Hour of Land

“A heartbreakingly gorgeous story of love and loss.”
–Azar Nafisi, author of  Reading Lolita in Tehran

“An intimate and sharply drawn portrait of one of the giants of science. This is a rare book.”
–Jad Abumrad, co-host of  RadioLab

This is a book to cherish and reread, as well as a beautiful gift for someone you love on Valentine’s Day.