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A review by elpanek
On the Move: A Life by Oliver Sacks
5.0
There is something childlike about the way Oliver Sacks approached life. It was partly the intensity of his curiosity, a curiosity that transformed everything – even Sacks’ own intense physical pain and his inevitable decrepitude – into insight. It was also his distance from the trappings of the typical adult life – the sobering responsibilities of parenthood, the sharing of a life with a partner, the duties of citizenship. This detachment allowed him to prioritize curiosity in a way that few of us can, to pursue it from England to San Francisco to Micronesia to wherever it led him next (hence: On The Move). Immediately before reading this book, I’d read a book about a famous hermit, and it was hard not to see parallels. Sacks wasn’t antisocial; so many of his encounters with patients, collaborators, and family make it clear that he was deeply empathetic and compassionate, refuting the stereotype of the aloof scientist. He loved people and people loved him, but ideas, not people, were always his North Star. For most of us, a life of the mind is a lonely, selfish one. For Sacks, it was illuminating.
His life, like many, is most interesting when it is least stable, in his 20’s. The juxtaposition of Sacks’ younger self – among the fellow hardbodies on Muscle Beach – with his more well-known public self – once described as a ‘stray Santa Claus’ – is striking, and for readers who are familiar only with the eventual Oliver Sacks, the thrill of discovering the man behind the work is part of the pleasure of reading this book. But the bulk of the pleasure comes from Sacks’ infectious love of scientific discovery, and of writing. Pop science is a burgeoning genre, but most often, journalists are grafted onto scientific breakthroughs so as to make them more comprehensible to a general audience. Sacks was a rare bird: an innovator in his field as well as a great writer who blended an ability to evoke character and a sense of place with an ability to do justice to the complexity of science, to be honest about its unsexyness rather than force it to conform to some narrative arc. He had a rare vantage point spanning the gap between science and literature, and he made the most of it. In this book, he turns that gift on himself, but he’s too modest to take center stage for very long. The real subject is the same as the subject of every Sacks’ book: our undiscovered minds.
His life, like many, is most interesting when it is least stable, in his 20’s. The juxtaposition of Sacks’ younger self – among the fellow hardbodies on Muscle Beach – with his more well-known public self – once described as a ‘stray Santa Claus’ – is striking, and for readers who are familiar only with the eventual Oliver Sacks, the thrill of discovering the man behind the work is part of the pleasure of reading this book. But the bulk of the pleasure comes from Sacks’ infectious love of scientific discovery, and of writing. Pop science is a burgeoning genre, but most often, journalists are grafted onto scientific breakthroughs so as to make them more comprehensible to a general audience. Sacks was a rare bird: an innovator in his field as well as a great writer who blended an ability to evoke character and a sense of place with an ability to do justice to the complexity of science, to be honest about its unsexyness rather than force it to conform to some narrative arc. He had a rare vantage point spanning the gap between science and literature, and he made the most of it. In this book, he turns that gift on himself, but he’s too modest to take center stage for very long. The real subject is the same as the subject of every Sacks’ book: our undiscovered minds.