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Leah Kaminsky’s debut novel, The Waiting Room, depicts one fateful day in the life of an Australian doctor and mother, Dina, living in Haifa, Israel. Dina is trying to maintain normalcy as she goes about her work as a family doctor, cares for her son, and fights to preserve her faltering relationship with her husband, with whom she’s expecting a daughter.
...moreOliver Sacks brought neuroscience closer to popular understanding and in turn, brought people closer to each other. At The Toast, Laura Passin’s thoughtful tribute to Sacks by way of memoir:
...moreWhat he conveys in so many of his great case studies–is not a lurid thrill at the exotic mental experience, but an urgent need to reassess what we know about being human… Maybe it’s my own idiosyncrasies talking, but nothing could have had a greater impact on my ability to connect with my mother than to think of us as living in slightly askew universes.
In Oliver Sacks’s last published essay, he writes about a patient who underwent surgery to take away his seizures caused by Klüver-Bucy syndrome—and left him with an insatiable appetite: for blocks of cheese, playing the piano, and child pornography. Read Suzanne Koven’s interview with Sacks about hallucinations—his book, and the phenomenon—here.
...moreBrain Pickings explores beloved science writer Oliver Sacks’s memoir On the Move: A Life, paying particularly close attention to the growth of his friendship with poet Thom Gunn, a friendship both beautiful and important for Sacks in his development as a writer.
...moreWe just noticed that Andrew Sullivan linked to our interview with Oliver Sacks on his website the Dish.
(He also linked to an interview Sacks did with the superb radio show/podcast Radiolab. If you liked our interview, you’ll probably like that one too!)
Thanks, Andrew, we love you back!
...moreIn a daily feature about “books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly,” NPR’s Two-Way blog linked to our interview with Oliver Sacks about his latest investigation of extraordinary neurology, Hallucinations.
Thanks, NPR! We love you back!
...more
NPR Books has a fascinating interview with Oliver Sacks on his new book Hallucinations.
An excerpt on hallucinations during migraines:
...more…At least on two occasions, I’ve had a smell — in particular a smell of hot buttered toast — with a strong sense that I was about 3 years old, being put in a high chair, and about to be given hot buttered toast.
Siri Hustvedt’s memoir is a sprawling exploration of memory and the ways trauma manifests in physical illness—less Mary Karr, more Oliver Sacks.