The author Lawrence Weschler began spending time with Oliver Sacks in the early 1980s, when he set out to profile the neurologist for his own new employer, The New Yorker. Almost a decade earlier, Dr. Sacks had published his masterpiece Awakenings - the account of his long-dormant patients miraculous but troubling return to life in a Bronx hospital ward. But the book had hardly been an immediate success, and the rumpled clinician was still largely unknown. Over the ensuing four years, the two men worked closely together until, for wracking personal reasons, Sacks asked Weschler to abandon the profile, a request to which Weschler acceded. The two remained close friends, however, across the next thirty years and then, just as Sacks was dying, he urged Weschler to take up the project once again. This book is the result of that entreaty.
Weschler sets Sacks’s brilliant table talk and extravagant personality in vivid relief, casting himself as a beanpole Sancho to Sacks’s 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. And all the while he is pouring out a stream of glorious, ribald, hilarious, and often profound conversation that establishes him as one of the great talkers of the age. Here is the definitive portrait of Sacks as our preeminent romantic scientist, a self-described “clinical ontologist” whose entire practice revolved around the single fundamental question he effectively asked each of his patients: How are you? Which is to say, How do you be?
A question which Weschler, with this book, turns back on the good doctor himself.
And How Are You, Dr. Sacks? is an intricately crafted, honest, and fascinating memoir and biography of Dr. Oliver Sacks by nonfiction titan Lawrence Weschler. Released 13th Aug by Macmillan on their Farrar, Straus & Giroux imprint, it's 400 pages and available in hardcover, ebook, and audio formats.
The point for me with biography is that the book captures the voice of the subject. This book really made Oliver Sacks live for me. The author had an enduring friendship and access to Dr. Sacks over decades. Additionally, he had detailed notes and interviews with friends and acquaintances as well as papers, journals, and letters.
I was familiar with Dr. Sacks through his works, Awakenings, and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and thought at the time that he would be a fascinating person to know. This book has cemented that to a certainty. What a fascinating man he was!
In a lot of ways, Sacks reminded me of Richard Feynman, both polymaths, both incredibly brilliant, both quite odd in a lot of ways, brutally (unwittingly?) honest, especially with people. There's also a lot of wit and humor here. The retelling of him being in a rage and, in the absence of alcohol, chugging a bottle of Worcestershire sauce which made him hiccup violently, made me giggle out loud.
This is a brilliant biography and is told with honesty, kindness, and warmth. The author is a prodigiously talented writer and the prose (even with difficult or sad subjects) is written with generosity and fairness. The story of his and his brother's experiences as children at boarding school moved me to tears.
Five stars. I recommend it unreservedly to lovers of biography, science bio, nonfiction, medical bios, etc.
Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.
