Few people can claim to have made such a profound impact on the public understanding of the brain and its inner workings. In this book, Oliver Sacks describes his time at Oxford University, his time spent in San Francisco and Los Angeles in the early nineteen sixties, before moving on to chart his progression from young doctor to his public role as a neurologist and author. Here we see Sacks's private passions - among them, motorcycling, weightlifting, travel, and botany - placed alongside his professional life. He will also explore his most formative relationships - with Francis Crick, Thom Gunn, W. H. Auden and Stephen Jay Gould - and write about his regard for those thinkers who have influenced his own work, including A. R. Luria, William James and Charles Darwin. This is Dr Sacks's first work of autobiography since his 'superb' Uncle Tungsten (The Times). Reviewing Uncle Tungsten, the Mail on Sunday wrote, 'this book is both a heartwarming account of a delightful, eccentric family life and an inspiring record of a remarkable intellectual odyssey', expect more of the same here.

Author Biography

Oliver Sacks was born in London in 1933, into a family of physicians and scientists. He received his medical education at Oxford and trained at Mt Zion Hospital in San Francisco and at UCLA. Since 1965, he has lived in New York City, where he is a professor of neurology at the NYU School of Medicine and consultant neurologist to the Little Sisters of the Poor. He is a visiting professor at the University of Warwick. Dr Sacks is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and the New Yorker, as well as various medical journals. He is the author of many books, including Musicophilia, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and Awakenings (which inspired the Oscar-nominated film). For more information on Dr Sacks's work, please visit www.oliversacks.com.