A meticulous, thorough and loving selection that constitutes not only a series of reflections and explorations but also a gripping memoir, a Bildungsroman at one remove ... Sacks’s letters are always expressive of his personality, though in various modes ... What makes reading through all of these missives delightful is the inescapable gift for metaphor that sparkles on almost every page.
Sacks was insatiably curious and wrote ceaselessly and joyfully about anything that caught his interest, which was just about everything. Readers get a new glimpse into his mind this year, nearly a decade after his death, thanks to a handsome new collection of the doctor’s letters ... Sack was alive to the world.
The first 200 pages of Oliver Sacks’s letters are among the best things I’ve read all year. He was new in America, not long out of Oxford University, writing to family and friends back home, and his observations were electric — wild and funny and befuddled and frank ... The entire book is worthwhile, but only the first third sings. After a certain point, by the early 1970s, fame sneaked up on Sacks and his letters became more decorous, professional and bland.
These well-edited letters, with their brief but useful footnotes, will only add to his lustre. Although they sometimes show the rhetoric, extravagance and self-pity Gunn deplored in Sacks, they also show the extraordinary breadth of his scholarship and his real genius for describing people and natural phenomena.
Sacks wrote in a learned, stylish and energetic prose ... Sacks showed generations of doctors (and patients) how medicine is just the starting point for an exploration of the possibilities of being human. With these letters, his legacy as an extraordinary writer, humanitarian and physician is secured.
Sacks is an endearing and entertaining prose stylist – inquisitive, often funny, never obtuse ... Draws an illuminating line from Sacks’s neurological career to his unlikely emergence as a bestselling author.
