On the Move: A Life, Oliver Sacks (Picador, £20)
Oliver Sacks is not like other scientists. Certainly there have been some in the past who have broken the mould, such as the bongo-playing Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynman. But as this immensely enjoyable memoir makes clear, Sacks—one of the world’s most famous neurologists—leaves all the rest in his tracks. He grew up in London in the 1950s, a tough place to be gay, and when he came out to his parents their reaction was strongly negative. After studying medicine at university he moved across the Atlantic, first to Canada and then to a medical placement in California where the formerly shy student turned into a leather-clad, motorbike-riding, weight-lifting, speed freak, working out on the muscle beaches of California, hanging out with Hell’s Angels and taking so much acid and amphetamines that his days became fraught with hallucinations.
It is striking that through all this, Sacks’s intellectual curiosity remained undimmed—he retained an enormous sense of commitment to his patients, many of whom were profoundly ill with debilitating brain diseases. Sacks’s uniqueness comes from the way he combines a fascination with the science behind his patients’ conditions with a grasp of how their perception of themselves and of the world has become affected. This capacity to view his patients as entire people, rather than mere hosts for a disease, is down to Sacks’s big-spiritedness, which shines out on every page and helps to make this book as moving as it is enjoyable.
