RaveScience...his inexhaustible curiosity, his sharpness of wit, and his special ability to create, maintain, and write about meaningful friendships, often with his patients, lent his writing humane, uncommon compassion ... All of these most endearing qualities are on full display in Everything in Its Place ... Sacks is again larger than life—as memoirist, clinician, naturalist, antiquarian, and philosopher ... Sacks thinks in exceptional cases ... In the powerful force of his prose, he crafted an explicit archetype for what we all might desire from our doctors ... masterful ... a recipe for psychiatry’s future.
Anne Harrington
RaveScience\"... masterpiece ... a readable, revisionist synthesis that shows that mind and brain medicine has not come as far as we imagine or wish. Harrington writes energetically about the contributions of seminal figures in psychiatry, neurology, and biology ... Harrington’s grasp of this story and the clarity with which, with limited moralism, she delivers a tale about the \'big picture\' of psychiatry and neurology is emblematic of the historian’s craft.\
Eric R. Kandel
RaveScienceKandel is an astute reader and a reflective observer. He has a penchant for thick description and a humanist’s appreciation of the sublime. Much in his study reminds the reader of the 19th-century natural historian, in whom a singular instance in nature could give rise to a grand idea. There is certainly that nostalgic, synthetic voice in his text. Neuroscience comes alive in Kandel’s study through the personal and imaginative ruminations of disordered minds. He finds in the literary and artistic endeavors of psychiatric and neurological patients material illustrations of deeper neuroscientific concepts. Each vignette forms a natural experiment. Each patient becomes a novel performance of nature. At his very best, Kandel recedes into the background and becomes a quiet observer of cultures, of societies, and most especially of minds puzzled at the experience of being a brain in a body. By granting so much agency to patient voices and personal knowledge, Kandel asks his reader to confront the anecdotal and inexplicable and think hard about what it means ... it is so skillfully written that it is easy to forget that his deeper purpose is to use the basic science and clinical medicine to ground his larger, more controversial argument: the notion that the mind can be studied biologically.
