A final volume of essays that showcase Sacks's broad range of interests—from his passion for ferns, swimming, and horsetails, to his final case histories exploring schizophrenia, dementia, and Alzheimer's.
Oliver Sacks, however, has a way of writing about his areas of lifelong interest — they include libraries, neurological disorders, botany and the history of science — that never fails to captivate me even if they are far from my own passions. Sacks possesses the crucial knack of neither dumbing down nor writing over the head of a lay reader ... Much science writing for a general readership strains to explain specialized topics. For Sacks it’s more about enthusing his way to promote appreciation (and greater understanding). We get excited about, say, ferns because he is so into their beauty and resilience ... If you love fascinating tidbits, this book of uncollected or previously unpublished essays is for you ... neatly summarizes the extraordinary career of a brilliant translator between far-apart worlds.
This posthumously published collection of essays by Oliver Sacks further cements the neurologist’s place in the pantheon of science writers ... His agility with the microscope of prose—zooming in on acute scenes from his own life, then back out to encapsulate life and science as a whole—is in full flourish in his latest book ... the pieces rhythmically shift from longer introspections to brief and punchy vignettes ... Fans of Sacks’s writing will likely gravitate towards the previously unpublished works collected in Everything ... Although his prolific writing career cast his robust imprint on our culture long ago, Sacks further secures his legacy with this most recent collection of his work.
The word 'Oneirism' is more than just an obscure exception to the 'i' before 'e' rhymelet. It also exemplifies the exceptionally advanced and sometimes stymying lexical breadth of Oliver Sacks’s writing—never more challenging than in this last, posthumous book ... this obscure terminology serves to honor the reader. If you don’t know our meanings, these terms imply, trust us that we are carefully chosen, as we trust you to look us up ... the topics here are actually a wonderfully odd lot ... Life bursts through all of Oliver Sacks’s writing. He was and will remain a brilliant singularity. It’s hard to call to mind one dull passage in his work—one dull sentence, for that matter. At the end of this book, and very near the end of his life, in 'Filter Fish,' he even manages to give gefilte fish, of all things, a wonderful star turn[.]
