Oliver Sacks is well known as neurologist, scientist and story teller. A thyroid hormone brought the man “back to life.” Also revived by the treatment was a “highly malignant, rapidly proliferating oat-cell carcinoma” that killed him within just a few days.ISBN: 978-0-4514-9289-0 fullscreen Figure 1 He was diagnosed with a severe thyroid malfunction. The essay “Cold Storage” could be lifted directly into an episode of the speculative-fiction TV series “Black Mirror.” Sacks recounts the case of “Uncle Toby,” a man who had been cared for at home by his family as he sank into an “icy stupor” that had lasted seven years when doctors discovered him. Who knew, for example, that hiccups have very little neurological explanation, but may be vestigial relations to the gill movements of our fishy ancestors? That a mature ginkgo tree has more than 100,000 leaves, and that they all fall at once each autumn? And then there’s the brain-damaged writer who devises a way to read again by tracing words on the back of his teeth, using his tongue. If you love fascinating tidbits, this book of uncollected or previously unpublished essays is for you. Fossil records show how, when most of the world’s plants and land animals were killed during a “great extinction” in the Cretaceous period, “life came bursting back in the form of ferns.”
We get excited about, say, ferns because he is so into their beauty and resilience. For Sacks it’s more about enthusing his way to promote appreciation (and greater understanding). Much science writing for a general readership strains to explain specialized topics.
The term diminishes their remarkable mash-up of scientific knowledge and the messier, more chaotic passions of life as we live it. A practicing physician and professor of neurology who died in 2015, he wrote a stack of well-received nonfiction books that fall in the category of science popularizers. Sacks possesses the crucial knack of neither dumbing down nor writing over the head of a lay reader. 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. As anyone who’s been cornered by a dullard at a party knows, one person’s fascinations do not always prove interesting in the telling.
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