And How Are You, Dr. Sacks?

April 15, 2019
Oliver Sacks, the celebrated neurologist and author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, comes across as a fascinating head case himself in this rollicking memoir. Weschler (Everything That Rises), the emeritus director of the New York Institute of the Humanities, recounts his long friendship with Sacks, focusing on the early 1980s, when Weschler was trying to write a New Yorker profile and biography of the doctor. The book is indeed largely about how the mercurial, neurotic, larger-than-life Sacks was on any given day. It unfolds in visits, outings, and restaurant meals as he veers between ebullient enthusiasms and depression and as the conversation meanders from his motorcycle speeding tickets to his weight-lifting championship, long-distance swimming exploits around the Bronx, his readings of the philosophers Hume and Leibniz, his writer’s block, the lifestyles of octopuses, and his childhood Sabbath rituals. The one constant is Sacks’s almost outrageous empathy for his neuropsychiatry patients (Weschler watched Sacks, a former drug addict, tell a patient that daily marijuana is okay but she should cut back on PCP to once a month). Sacks’s many fans will love this entertaining portrait of a charismatic original. Photos.

May 15, 2019
A deeply personal account of the acclaimed neurologist. Former New Yorker staff writer Weschler (Waves Passing in the Night: Walter Murch in theLand of Astrophysicists, 2017, etc.) concedes that this varied mix of biography and memoir is not a full biography of Oliver Sacks (1933-2015). Rather, the author focuses on the early 1980s, when he was regularly meeting with Sacks, "serving as a sort of Boswell to his Johnson," compiling notebooks for a profile he planned to write. For Weschler, these years are the "hinge of [Sacks'] professional and creative progress," when this "virtual hermit would be on the precipice of worldwide fame." What emerges is a dazzling portrait of a "graphomaniac," a "grand soliloquizer," an "unparalleled clinician," a "studiously detached naturalist," prodigious swimmer, weight lifter, and reckless motorcycle speed demon. Weschler learned a number of intimate details about Sacks, including that he was gay: "I have lived a life wrapped in concealment and wracked by inhibition," Sacks told him. He asked Weschler not to publish the profile, and it was only when he was dying that he told him: "Now....You have to." 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. Early on, he realized Sacks was a prodigy who possessed a "strange consciousness and awareness...of his own oddity." Weschler also interviewed Sacks' close friends, including the poet Thom Gunn and Jonathan Miller, the physician member of the comedy revue Beyond the Fringe. The author chronicles his time spent with Sacks on his rounds with patients as he brilliantly diagnosed their neurological illnesses. He joined Sacks when his bestseller, Awakenings, was being filmed; Sacks and Robin Williams became friends. 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.

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Starred review from June 1, 2019
Weschler's (Waves Passing in the Night, 2017) book about neurologist Oliver Sacks (1933-2015), 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. The article foundered on Sacks' unwillingness to have his homosexuality revealed; later, with death in sight, he relented (meanwhile, outing himself in his On the Move, 2015). Weschler initially caught Sacks at a turning point in his life and career. He was suffering massive writer's block while working on his own neurological case history, A Leg to Stand On (1984), and enduring professional backlash from his work on encephalitis lethargica patients, famously reported in Awakenings (1973). Sacks was the rare person who became deeply immersed in diverse pursuits beyond his main calling?from swimming (since earliest childhood and daily if possible) to chemistry (see Uncle Tungsten, 2001), marine biology, ferns and cycads, bodybuilding, motorcycle traveling, Victorian medical literature, and philosophical ontology?and never lost his interest in them. Sacks was and is the quintessence of fascinating.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

July 1, 2019

Weschler (Waves Passing in the Night) met with the late British neurologist Oliver Sacks (1933-2015) almost weekly from 1981 to 1984, compiling 15 volumes of source material comprised of interviews with Sacks himself, as well as his lifelong friends, colleagues, and family members. The intention was to write a biography, but Sacks, uncomfortable with making public certain aspects of his personal life (primarily his sexuality) asked Weschler to shelve the project. As Sacks neared death from terminal cancer, he asked Weschler to return to the book. The result is a unique account that reads like an extended, erudite, and entertaining New Yorker article; this is unsurprising since Weschler was a staff writer for the magazine for two decades. With Weschler's examination, Sacks's larger-than-life presence is humanized. Readers are essentially in the room with Sacks and Weschler as they converse about many topics, including Sacks's childhood, experimentation with drugs, mentors, and work with patients. VERDICT This biographical memoir offers a window into the world Sacks inhabited--a world full of brilliance, insecurity, and a robust enthusiasm for life. Recommended for readers who wish they had had the privilege of knowing Sacks while he was alive.--Ragan O'Malley, Saint Ann's Sch., Brooklyn

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2019

Wechsler first met one-of-a-kind neurologist Oliver Sacks when profiling him for The New Yorker in the 1980s. They became close friends, with Sacks ultimately appointing Wechsler his official biographer. What's presented here: a personal take.

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.