The New York Times Book Review - Andrew Solomon
With On the Move, [Sacks] has finally presented himself as he has presented others: as both fully vulnerable and an object of curiosity…The primary mark of a good memoir is that it makes you nostalgic for experiences you never had, and Sacks captures the electrifying discoveries he made, especially those in his early career, with vivid, hard-edge prose…Sacks' ability to enact and celebrate intuition in medicine and precision in art is singular.
The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani
…deeply moving…Dr. Sacks trains his descriptive and analytic powers on his own life, providing a revealing look at his childhood and coming of age, his discovery and embrace of his vocation, and his development as a writer. He gives us touching portraits, brimming with life and affection, of friends and family members…This is a more intimate book than Dr. Sacks's earlier ventures into autobiographical territory…and the more he tells us about himself, the more we come to see how rooted his own gifts as an artist and a doctor are in his early family experiences in England and what he once thought of as emotional liabilities…[Sacks's] writing, which [he] says gives him a pleasure "unlike any other," has also been a gift to his readersof erudition, sympathy and an abiding understanding of the joys, trials and consolations of the human condition.
Publishers Weekly - Audio
07/27/2015
Sacks, an esteemed neurologist and the author of such bestsellers as Awakenings (1973) and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1983), offers a candid memoir chronicling his colorful personal and professional journey, made all the more poignant given his recent diagnosis of terminal cancer. Actor and voice-over artist Woren delivers a generally pleasant and competent reading of the audio edition of the momentous title. Yet somehow his delivery does not match the emotional power found in Sacks’s narrative. It doesn’t help matters that—even though Sacks is a native of the United Kingdom—Woren chooses not to add any traces of a British accent in his performance of the first-person elements of the book, though he does provide a mix of accents for various supporting figures sprinkled into the real-life events. Given such intense subject matter as wild experimentation with LSD and similar hallucinogens in the 1960s, extreme sports and California body-building culture, mingling with the literary and pop-culture elite of the past half century, and of course numerous groundbreaking medical discoveries, Woren’s mild approach just doesn’t fit the occasion. A Knopf hardcover. (Apr.)
Publishers Weekly
★ 03/23/2015
The celebrated bard of the brain's quirks reveals a flamboyant secret life and a multitude of intellectual passions in this rangy, introspective autobiography. Picking up from his boyhood memoir, Uncle Tungsten, neurologist Sacks (The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat) explores the complexities of his adult experience, including his homosexuality, which yielded a number of intense but transitory affairs; obsessions with weight lifting and motorcycles (complete with leather wardrobe); and a ravaging addiction to amphetamines. While Sacks's physical and emotional lives are more prominent here than in past writings, he's still fascinated with the mind and presents absorbing disquisitions on Tourette's syndrome, autism, visual processing, and the Darwinian struggle of mental processes. His loosely structured narrative takes innumerable detours, rambling among memoiristic snippets (including a pungent story about a journey through America's truck stop culture), sketches of writers and celebrities (W.H. Auden, Robin Williams, Francis Crick), moving portraits of close friends and family, and, as always, engrossing case studies of neurology patients. Sacks's writing is lucid, earnest, and straightforward, yet always raptly attuned to subtleties of character and feeling in himself and others; the result, closely following his announcement that he has terminal cancer, is a fitting retrospective of his lifelong project of making science a deeply humanistic pursuit. Photos. (May)
From the Publisher
A New York Times Notable Book
One of the Best Books of the Year: NPR, San Francisco Chronicle, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, BookPage, Slate, Men’s Journal
“Intimate. . . . Brim[s] with life and affection.” —The New York Times
“[A] wonderful memoir, which richly demonstrates what an extraordinary life it has been. . . . A fascinating account—a sort of extended case study, really—of Sacks’ remarkably active, iconoclastic adulthood.” —Los Angeles Times
“A glorious memoir. . . . In this volume Sacks opens himself to recognition, much as he has opened the lives of others to being recognized in their fullness.” —The Atlantic
“Pulses with his distinctive energy and curiosity.” —The New York Review of Books
“A beautiful vision, one that embraces an infinite spectrum of wonder. . . . On the Move illustrates what an exceptional human being he is. . . . He is fascinated by seemingly everything, and, damn, the man can write.” —Salon
“Marvelous. . . . He studies himself as he has studied others: compassionately, unblinkingly, intelligently, acceptingly and honestly.” —The Wall Street Journal
“Sacks’ ability to enact and celebrate intuition in medicine and precision in art is singular.” —The New York Times Book Review
“[Sacks is] a wonderful storyteller. . . . It’s his keen attentiveness as a listener and observer, and his insatiable curiosity, that makes his work so powerful.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“Remarkably candid and deeply affecting. . . . Sacks’s empathy and intellectual curiosity, his delight in, as he calls it, ‘joining particulars with generalities’ and, especially, ‘narratives with neuroscience’—have never been more evident than in his beautifully conceived new book.” —The Boston Globe
“Intriguing. . . . When describing his patients and their problems, he is attentive and precise, straightforward and sympathetic, and he brings these worthy qualities to his descriptions of his younger self.” —The Washington Post
“A compelling read. . . . Offers a glimpse into one of the greatest minds of our time.” —Men’s Journal
“What a self this book reveals! A man animated by boundless curiosity, wide-ranging intelligence, gratitude for flawed humanity, perseverance despite setbacks. . . . We’re lucky to have all the books, including On the Move. It’s intensely, beautifully, incandescently alive.” —Newsday
“An ebullient telling of a remarkable life.” —Paste
“This remarkable man lifts us all. . . . [On the Move] is not only a record of his life-affirming characterological extravagance but also a meditation on what it is to be human in an age of medical arrogance and the numbing clout of technology.” —The Los Angeles Review of Books
“An unforgettably passionate, joyous journey.” —The Daily Beast
“[A] beautifully constructed and moving memoir. . . . His life and work are a gift.” —The Times Literary Supplement (London)
“Moving. . . . Written with exceptional grace and clarity.” —Richmond Times-Dispatch
Library Journal
04/15/2015
Recently, author (Awakenings; The Man Who Mistoook His Wife for a Hat) and neurologist Sacks (neurology, New York Univ.)published an essay in which he eloquently speaks of life, death, and his diagnosis of terminal cancer. He states that he has been lucky to live a long, colorful life and to have many accomplishments. This autobiography covers much of that same ground. Sacks, now 81, writes of early school memories, first loves, and his desire to travel. He even utilizes entries from a journal he kept while traveling coast to coast on a motorcycle in the United States. The latter half of the book focuses more on his medical and writing achievements, providing background to his previously published works. It's clear how important his family is to him, and how they've played a role in his experiences. Frank and candid, Sacks sounds as though he's talking to the reader from across the dinner table. His story is a reminder that we create our own journeys. VERDICT For fans of Sacks, those who enjoy biographies, and anyone with an interest in medical or neurological work.—Caitlin Kenney, Niagara Falls P.L, NY
JULY 2015 - AudioFile
ON THE MOVE is more personal than Sacks's previous books on neurology. As narrator, Dan Woren isn’t equal to the personal side. Here, Sacks recounts his passions for motorcycles, weight lifting, swimming, and writing. He has suffered some heartbreaking personal tragedy, including his brother’s struggles with schizophrenia and his mother’s inability to accept his own sexual orientation. Woren’s pacing is varied and upbeat but in an oddly uniform manner. We never feel the magic of riding the roads of Northern California on a motorcycle or the fear of being discovered as a gay man in postwar England or the joy of writing. Also, given Sacks’s vignette style of writing, it’s too easy to end up in the middle of an anecdote having missed its introduction. A.B. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2015-03-05
The prolific physician's adventure-filled life. Sacks (Neurology/NYU School of Medicine; Hallucinations, 2012, etc.) continues where he left off in Uncle Tungsten (2001), the story of his youthful fascination with chemistry. Describing himself as quiet, shy, and solitary, he nevertheless has become a man of many passions: science, medicine, motorbikes, and, for years, assorted drugs, including cannabis, LSD, amphetamines, and chloral hydrate. Sacks writes candidly of his mother's rage when she learned he was homosexual, and he ruefully recalls several brief love affairs. Sent away from his family during World War II, he believes, caused him to feel inhibited in intimate relationships. But he celebrates many close friendships, notably with fellow physician (and entertainer) Jonathan Miller and poet Thom Gunn, and he offers a touching portrait of his brother Michael, who was schizophrenic. Sacks went to Oxford aiming to become a research scientist, but after one project failed dismally, he followed family tradition and studied medicine (both parents and two brothers were physicians). After working at Middlesex Hospital in England, he took an internship at Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco, where he fell in love with the lifestyle and landscape, buying a motorcycle and taking to the road every chance he had. "By day I would be the genial, white-coated Dr. Oliver Sacks," he recalls, "but at nightfall I would exchange my white coat for my motorbike leathers, and, anonymous, wolf-like…rove the streets or mount the sinuous curves of Mount Tamalpais." By the time he left California in 1965, he had covered 100,000 miles. Sacks loved clinical medicine, vividly evoking his observations and investigations in Awakenings (1973), Seeing Voices (1989), and An Anthropologist on Mars (1995). The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985) made the New York Times bestseller list and, to his surprise, catapulted him to fame. Despite impressionistic chronology, which occasionally causes confusion and repetition, this is an engaging memoir by a consummate storyteller.