The author Lawrence Weschler began spending time with Oliver Sacks in the early 1980s, when he set out to profile the neurologist forThe New Yorker. For personal reasons, Sacks asked Weschler to abandon the profile, a request to which Weschler acceded. The two remained close friends, however, across the next thirty years and then, just as Sacks was dying, he urged Weschler to take up the project once again. This book is the result of that entreaty.
...[a] fascinating account ... Weschler...serves up a potpourri of conversations, diary entries, interviews, letters and reportage to paint a vibrant portrait of his friend's fully engaged, at times frenetic, life. Though it inevitably covers some of the same ground as Sacks's own 2015 memoir...this blend of journalistic objectivity and subjective engagement in Sacks's daily life enlarges and complements the neurologist's self-portrait ... But for all Weschler's deep affection for Sacks, he doesn't shy away from the controversies that at times swirled around his subject's life and work ... As Lawrence Weschler concedes, with obvious regret, someday a person who 'will have to be a lot younger than I am now' is going to produce a full-length biography of Oliver Sacks. In doing so, that writer will be in Weschler's debt for the wealth of valuable source material his book provides.
Weschler’s...book about neurologist Oliver Sacks...which began as a prospective profile for the New Yorker, isn’t a standard biography, but instead a memoir of what his subject told him about his life, work, and his wide-ranging interests over the several-years-long course of Weschler’s labor on the profile and the development of a friendship that ended only with Sacks’ death ... Sacks was and is the quintessence of fascinating.
Much of the book is told in Sacks’ own words, which Weschler transcribed, or from handwritten letters Sacks sent him, giving the narrative a rich immediacy ... Also included is a forthright 'digression' on Sacks’ propensity to exaggerate or make things up. The two were still very close near the end, and Weschler intimately recounts Sacks’ final years. A thoroughly engaging and enchanting story.
