Sacks’s empathy and intellectual curiosity, his delight in, as he calls it, 'joining particulars with generalities' and, especially, 'narratives with neuroscience' — have never been more evident than in his beautifully conceived new book, On The Move. This meta memoir, in which Sacks reconsiders aspects of his life and work that he’s written about in a dozen previous books, is remarkably candid and deeply affecting ... Sacks offers these revelations neither to titillate the reader nor to castigate himself but, rather, to give a fuller picture of himself as a person and, particularly, as a writer ... On The Move is not a portrait of an era, like, for example, Patti Smith’s Just Kids. It’s an old-fashioned memoir (what used to be called 'memoirs') in which journal entries, snippets of decades-old conversations, lost jobs, houses, and lovers rearrange themselves through recollection into a new and meaningful whole ... It’s a gift, a message from a writer who, though past 80 and mortally ill, retains the ethos of the handsome stud sitting astride a motorbike on its cover: Stay alive; keep moving.

It is a fascinating account — a sort of extended case study, really — of Sacks’ remarkably active, iconoclastic adulthood ... On the Move is filled with both wonder and wonderments ... The vivid self-portrait that emerges is of an immoderate risk taker with a brilliant 'wildly associative mind,' an enthusiast who regards 'all neurology, everything as a sort of adventure' ... The book is also filled with amusing and sometimes staggering accounts of goofs and gaffes that make one wonder how someone like Sacks would fare in today’s more rigid, competitive, and 'increasingly professionalized' environment ... On the Move takes a few extraneous detours, including long excerpts from youthful travel journals and too much on biologist Gerald Edelman’s Neural Darwinism, but it leaves us wanting more.

He does not play down the anger of some patients who have felt betrayed by his portrayals of them, nor does he deny his frustration with wary ones who resisted being depicted ... this memoir is more a history of his career than an analysis of it ... With On the Move, he has finally presented himself as he has presented others: as both fully vulnerable and an object of curiosity ... The most attractive and most problematic qualities of his writing turn out to be what are best and worst in him. His immersion in his patients’ brokenness is mirrored here in his acknowledgment of his own brokenness, his belated empathy for his younger self ... The primary mark of a good memoir is that it makes you nostalgic for experiences you never had, and Sacks captures the electrifying discoveries he made, especially those in his early career, with vivid, hard-edge prose ... Sacks assumes sometimes that we know more of his past than we do, and sometimes that we know less. Parts of this undertaking read dismayingly like the book one might write for one’s grandchildren ... His writing sometimes has a tinge of exposé, and there is no evidence that his clinical skills outrank those of other neurologists. To dismiss him on either of these fronts, however, misses the central fact that translating between those two arenas has great value of its own.

...this is as close as we are likely to come to a classical autobiography, arranged in roughly chronological order and exhilaratingly punctuated with meditations on the life scientific, artistic, mechanical, pharmaceutical and erotic ... He is both forthcoming and not about his family ... On the Move is a painful, comic and stoically unself-pitying account of a life haunted by difficulties with 'the three Bs: bonding, belonging and believing'. In retrospect, it appears as a life whose innumerable moments of apparent disaster – failed research, bungled love affairs, sackings from jobs, manuscripts lost or destroyed, injury and, latterly, mortal illness – have proved to be part of a lengthy and intensely humane creative process.

This memoir reveals Oliver Sacks as an even larger-than-life figure than I'd imagined ... Strangely for such an adventurous giant of a man, he confesses about one third of the way through the book: 'I was timid, diffident, insecure, and submissive'. The rest of the book bears this out, often recording his childlike delight when some great figure praises his work. Coursing through On the Move is his constant sense of joy in the natural world, in scientific epiphanies, and people in all their oddity ... He is surely one of the most singular and inspiring men of our time.

...revelations about the state of his emotions are rare. He does not dwell on darkness. He never reveals how he broke his amphetamine addiction or what that felt like. He states in passing that he hasn't had sex in 35 years, but never remarks on what that means to him. Even when he acknowledges feeling isolated or hurt, he never lingers on the bad feelings. It's not until the book's end, where he writes with obvious joy about finding love, that he reveals the strong emotion that surely has been there all along.

Sacks assuredly outshines that sorrow with On The Move’s engaging narration and its easygoing frankness while unpacking personal details and some fresh insights gained from his earliest case studies ... Sacks, the motorcycle-riding physician, as he grows, learns and achieves, is often straddling this middle ground, speeding forward, like two sides of the road to his left and right, two different yet collaborative schools of thought to consider, as he forges ahead, not propelled toward some middle ground, but his own path, rather, with each perspective on each side informing him, in balance ... This is a story of studying and responding to the unique souls he encounters and how they, subtly or substantially, shaped his own; between the personal and the professional, both sides of the road.

On the Move is a glorious memoir that throws open that window and illuminates the world that we have seen through it. In this volume Sacks opens himself to recognition, much as he has opened the lives of others to being recognized in their fullness. In brief remarks on his almost 50 years of psychoanalysis, Sacks tells the reader that his analyst, Leonard Shengold, “has taught me about paying attention, listening to what lies beyond consciousness or words.” This is what Sacks has taught so many through his practice as a healer and through his work as a writer.

On the Move, his most intimate book, is passionate about many things -- motorcycling and weightlifting, science and medicine, family and friends. It is also remarkably candid about his homosexuality and a onetime four-year addiction to amphetamines ... Learning to come to terms with unique patients has given Oliver Sacks permission to come to terms with himself. And what a self this book reveals! A man animated by boundless curiosity, wide-ranging intelligence, gratitude for flawed humanity, perseverance despite setbacks ... It's intensely, beautifully, incandescently alive.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of On the Move is the array of stories about the origins of Sacks’ many books. He shares his difficulties with writer’s block and depression. And he describes how some ideas evolved into books in unlikely ways ... No matter what he writes about — whether struggling to understand what his patients are going through, or describing his love of swimming or photography — Sacks always seems open to learning more. He appears keenly interested in everything and everyone he encounters. He’s a wonderful storyteller, a gift he says he inherited from his parents, both of whom were doctors. But as he proves again in his latest (and perhaps final) book, it’s his keen attentiveness as a listener and observer, and his insatiable curiosity, that makes his work so powerful.

The celebrated bard of the brain's quirks reveals a flamboyant secret life and a multitude of intellectual passions in this rangy, introspective autobiography ... While Sacks's physical and emotional lives are more prominent here than in past writings, he's still fascinated with the mind and presents absorbing disquisitions on Tourette's syndrome, autism, visual processing, and the Darwinian struggle of mental processes. His loosely structured narrative takes innumerable detours ... Sacks's writing is lucid, earnest, and straightforward, yet always raptly attuned to subtleties of character and feeling in himself and others; the result, closely following his announcement that he has terminal cancer, is a fitting retrospective of his lifelong project of making science a deeply humanistic pursuit.

Sacks writes candidly of his mother’s rage when she learned he was homosexual, and he ruefully recalls several brief love affairs ... he celebrates many close friendships, notably with fellow physician (and entertainer) Jonathan Miller and poet Thom Gunn, and he offers a touching portrait of his brother Michael, who was schizophrenic ... Despite impressionistic chronology, which occasionally causes confusion and repetition, this is an engaging memoir by a consummate storyteller.