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Sacks - On the Move: A Life

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When Oliver Sacks was twelve years old, a perceptive schoolmaster wrote in his report: Sacks will go far, if he does not go too far. It is now abundantly clear that Sacks has never stopped going. From its opening pages on his youthful obsession with motorcycles and speed, On the Move is infused with his restless energy. As he recounts his experiences as a young neurologist in the early 1960s, first in California, where he struggled with drug addiction, and then in New York, where he discovered a long-forgotten illness in the back wards of a chronic hospital, we see how his engagement with patients comes to define his life. With unbridled honesty and humor, Sacks shows us that the same energy that drives his physical passions--weight lifting and swimming--also drives his cerebral passions. He writes about his love affairs, both romantic and intellectual; his guilt over leaving his family to come to America; his bond with his schizophrenic brother; and the writers and scientists--Thom Gunn, A.R. Luria, W.H. Auden, Gerald M. Edelman, Francis Crick--who influenced him. On the Move is the story of a brilliantly unconventional physician and writer--and of the man who has illuminated the many ways that the brain makes us human. From the Hardcover edition.;When Oliver Sacks was twelve years old, a perceptive schoolmaster wrote in his report: Sacks will go far, if he does not go too far. It is now abundantly clear that Sacks has never stopped going. From its opening pages on his youthful obsession with motorcycles and speed, On the Move is infused with his restless energy. As he recounts his experiences as a young neurologist in the early 1960s, first in California, where he struggled with drug addiction, and then in New York, where he discovered a long-forgotten illness in the back wards of a chronic hospital, we see how his engagement with patients comes to define his life. With unbridled honesty and humor, Sacks shows us that the same energy that drives his physical passions--weight lifting and swimming--also drives his cerebral passions. He writes about his love affairs, both romantic and intellectual; his guilt over leaving his family to come to America; his bond with his schizophrenic brother; and the writers ...

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ALSO BY OLIVER SACKS Migraine Awaken - photo 1
ALSO BY OLIVER SACKS Migraine Awakenings A Leg to Stand On The Man Who - photo 2ALSO BY OLIVER SACKS Migraine Awakenings A Leg to Stand On The Man Who - photo 3
ALSO BY OLIVER SACKS

Migraine

Awakenings

A Leg to Stand On

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

Seeing Voices

An Anthropologist on Mars

The Island of the Colorblind

Uncle Tungsten

Oaxaca Journal

Musicophilia

The Minds Eye

Hallucinations

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A KNOPF AND ALFRED A KNOPF CANADA - photo 4THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A KNOPF AND ALFRED A KNOPF CANADA - photo 5

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF AND ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA

COPYRIGHT 2015 BY OLIVER SACKS

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PUBLISHED IN THE UNITED STATES BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, A DIVISION OF PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE LLC, NEW YORK, AND IN CANADA BY ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA, A DIVISION OF PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE LTD., TORONTO, PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE COMPANIES.

WWW.AAKNOPF.COM

WWW.PENGUINRANDOMHOUSE.CA

WWW.OLIVERSACKS.COM

KNOPF, BORZOI BOOKS, AND THE COLOPHON ARE REGISTERED TRADEMARKS OF PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE LLC.

KNOPF CANADA AND COLOPHON ARE TRADEMARKS OF PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE LTD.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

SACKS, OLIVER W.

ON THE MOVE : A LIFE / BY OLIVER SACKS.

PAGES CM

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK.

ISBN 978-0-385-35254-3 ( HARDCOVER : ALK. PAPER ) ISBN

978-0-385-35255-0 ( EBOOK ) 1. SACKS, OLIVER W.

2. NEUROLOGISTS ENGLAND BIOGRAPHY.

3. NEUROLOGISTS UNITED STATES BIOGRAPHY. I. TITLE.

RC 339.52. S 23 A 3 2015

616.80092 DC 23

[ B ] 2015001870

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

SACKS, OLIVER W., AUTHOR

ON THE MOVE : A LIFE / OLIVER SACKS.

ISSUED IN PRINT AND ELECTRONIC FORMATS.

ISBN 978-0-345-80896-7

EBOOK ISBN 978-0-345-80898-1

1. SACKS, OLIVER W.

2. NEUROLOGISTS ENGLAND BIOGRAPHY.

1. TITLE.

RC 339.52. S 23 A 3 2015 616.80092 C 2015-901279-1

eBook ISBN9780385352550

COVER PHOTOGRAPH BY DOUGLAS WHITE

v4.1_r3

a

for Billy

Life must be lived forwards but can only be understood backwards.

Kierkegaard

Contents
On the Move

W hen I was at boarding school, sent away during the war as a little boy, I had a sense of imprisonment and powerlessness, and I longed for movement and power, ease of movement and superhuman powers. I enjoyed these, briefly, in dreams of flying and, in a different way, when I went horse riding in the village near school. I loved the power and suppleness of my horse, and I can still evoke its easy and joyous movement, its warmth and sweet, hayey smell.

Most of all, I loved motorbikes. My father had had one before the war, a Scott Flying Squirrel with a big water-cooled engine and an exhaust like a scream, and I wanted a powerful bike, too. Images of bikes and planes and horses merged for me, as did images of bikers and cowboys and pilots, whom I imagined to be in precarious but jubilant control of their powerful mounts. My boyish imagination was fed by Westerns and films of heroic air combat, seeing pilots risking their lives in Hurricanes and Spitfires but lent protection by their thick flying jackets, as motorcyclists were by their leather jackets and helmets.

When I returned to London as a ten-year-old in 1943, I enjoyed sitting in the window seat of our front room, watching and trying to identify motorbikes as they sped by (after the war, when petrol was easier to get, they became much commoner). I could identify a dozen or more marquesAJS, Triumph, BSA, Norton, Matchless, Vincent, Velocette, Ariel, and Sunbeam, as well as rare foreign bikes like BMWs and Indians.

As a teenager, I would go regularly to Crystal Palace with a like-minded cousin to see the motorbike racing there. I often hitchhiked to Snowdonia to climb or to the Lake District to swim and sometimes got a lift on a motorbike. Riding pillion thrilled me and stimulated daydreams of the sleek, powerful bike I would get one day.

My first motorbike, when I was eighteen, was a secondhand BSA Bantam with a little two-stroke engine and, as it turned out, faulty brakes. I took it to Regents Park on its maiden ride, which turned out to be fortunate, possibly lifesaving, because the throttle jammed when I was going flat out and the brakes were not strong enough to stop the bike or even slow it more than a little. Regents Park is encircled by a road, and I found myself going round and round it, perched on a motorbike I had no way of stopping. I hooted or yelled to warn pedestrians out of my way, but after I had made two or three circuits, everyone gave me a free path and shouted encouragement as I passed by again and again. I knew the bike would have to stop eventually, when it ran out of gas, and finally, after dozens of involuntary circuits of the park, the engine sputtered and died.

My mother had been very much against my getting a bike in the first place. That I expected, but I was surprised by my fathers opposition, since he had ridden a bike himself. They had tried to dissuade me from getting a bike by buying me a little car, a 1934 Standard that could barely do forty miles per hour. I had grown to hate the little car, and one day, impulsively, I sold it and used the proceeds to buy the Bantam. Now I had to explain to my parents that a feeble little car or bike was dangerous because one lacked the power to pull out of trouble and that I would be much safer with a larger, more powerful bike. They acceded to this reluctantly and funded me for a Norton.

On my first Norton, a 250 cc machine, I had a couple of near accidents. The first came when I approached a red traffic light too fast and, realizing that I could not safely brake or turn, drove straight on and somehowmiraculouslypassed between two lines of cars going in opposite directions. Reaction came a minute later: I rode another block, parked the bike in a side roadand fainted.

The second accident occurred at night in heavy rain on a winding country road. A car coming in the opposite direction did not dim its headlights, and I was blinded. I thought there would be a head-on collision, but at the last moment I stepped off the bike (an expression of ridiculous mildness for a potentially lifesaving but potentially fatal maneuver). I let the bike go in one direction (it missed the car but was totaled) and myself in another. Fortunately, I was wearing a helmet, boots, and gloves, as well as full leathers, and though I slid twenty yards or so on the rain-slicked road, I was so well protected by my clothing that I did not get a scratch.

My parents were shocked, but very glad I was in one piece, and raised strangely little objection to my getting another, more powerful bikea 600 cc Norton Dominator. At this point, I had finished at Oxford, and I was about to go to Birmingham, where I had a job as a house surgeon for the first six months of 1960, and I was careful to say that with the newly opened M1 motorway between Birmingham and London and a fast bike, I would be able to come home every weekend. The motorway in those days had no speed limit, so I could be back in a little over an hour.

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