Gratitude
Book by Oliver Sacks
DETAILS
Publisher : Knopf; Illustrated edition (November 24, 2015) Language : English Hardcover : 64 pages ISBN-10 : 0451492935 ISBN-13 : 978-0451492937 Item Weight : 6 ounces Dimensions : 5.02 x 0.45 x 7.16 inches Best Sellers Rank: #30,381 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #55 in Medical Professional Biographies #71 in Essays (Books) #944 in Memoirs (Books) , “My predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved. I have been given much and I have given something in return. Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.” —Oliver Sacks No writer has succeeded in capturing the medical and human drama of illness as honestly and as eloquently as Oliver Sacks. During the last few months of his life, he wrote a set of essays in which he movingly explored his feelings about completing a life and coming to terms with his own death. “It is the fate of every human being,” Sacks writes, “to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.” Together, these four essays form an ode to the uniqueness of each human being and to gratitude for the gift of life. “Oliver Sacks was like no other clinician, or writer. He was drawn to the homes of the sick, the institutions of the most frail and disabled, the company of the unusual and the ‘abnormal.’ He wanted to see humanity in its many variants and to do so in his own, almost anachronistic way—face to face, over time, away from our burgeoning apparatus of computers and algorithms. And, through his writing, he showed us what he saw.” —Atul Gawande, author of Being Mortal Read more
REVIEW
This is the last book from the prolific neurologist essayist Oliver sacks, who died two weeks before the last piece appeared in print. They’re unlike any other essays Sacks published, except in the humanity that shines through them. He wrote them knowing that he was dying. In 2005, he had been diagnosed with cancer of the eye. The cancer was treated and seemed done with. In 2010, he published a book, The Mind’s Eye, in which, among other cases, he discusses his own. In 2013 he published the first essay in this book, “Mercury,” in which he ruminates on the pleasures of old age: he doesn’t dismiss the frailties it brings with it but he moves beyond them in writing about what one still can do. Then eighteen months later he learned that his old cancer had metastasized to his liver. He wrote another essay, “My Own Life,” expressing his gratitude for the life he had been allowed to lead, and then went under the knife, seeking to extend his active life by several months. It worked. The last two essays in this book are the product. In “My Periodic Table,” he writes about his lifelong fascination with the periodic table, but the piece is also about his impending death. He wrote the final piece, “Sabbath,” over and over in the short time left to him. It is a non-religious Jew’s affirmation of the importance of Jewish ritual in his life. It’s about how we’re shaped by the life we lead. Gone from this book is the careful analysis of complicated symptoms, the blending of advanced scientific knowledge with Sacks’ extraordinary respect for his patients’ human worth. These are Last Letters. There was no time, or need, any more for elaborate explanation. These are love letters to the human condition. As such, they are close in intent, though not form, to Carnegie-Mellon professor Randy Pauch’s The Last Lecture (2008), co-authored when he too was dying. They differ from Pauch’s work in two respects: concision (very short essays) and poetry (Sacks was a poet of scientific writing). I’m grateful to Oliver Sacks for this last gift to his readers. I’ll miss him.
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