On the Move: A Life

by Oliver Sacks Narrated by Dan Woren

Overview

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.

Editorial Reviews

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 readers—of erudition, sympathy and an abiding understanding of the joys, trials and consolations of the human condition.

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

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.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171963576
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	04/28/2015
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Muscle Beach
 
When I finally made it to New York in June of 1961, I borrowed money from a cousin and bought a new bike, a BMW R60—the trustiest of all the BMW models. I wanted no more to do with used bikes, like the R69 which some idiot or criminal had fitted with the wrong pistons, the pistons that had seized up in Alabama.
 
I spent a few days in New York, and then the open road beckoned me. I covered thousands of miles in my slow, erratic return to California. The roads were wonderfully empty, and going across South Dakota and Wyoming, I would scarcely see another soul for hours. The silence of the bike, the effortlessness of riding, lent a magical, dreamlike quality to my motion.
 
There is a direct union of oneself with a motorcycle, for it is so geared to one’s proprioception, one’s movements and postures, that it responds almost like part of one’s own body. Bike and rider become a single, indivisible entity; it is very much like riding a horse. A car cannot become part of one in quite the same way.
 
I arrived back in San Francisco at the end of June, just in time to exchange my bike leathers for the white coat of an intern in Mount Zion Hospital.
 
During my long road trip, with snatched meals here and there, I had lost weight, but I had also worked out when possible at gyms, so I was in trim shape, under two hundred pounds, when I showed off my new bike and my new body in New York in June. But when I returned to San Francisco, I decided to “bulk up” (as weight lifters say) and have a go at a weight- lifting record, one which I thought might be just within my reach. Putting on weight was particularly easy to do at Mount Zion, because its coffee shop offered double cheeseburgers and huge milk shakes, and these were free to residents and interns. Rationing myself to five double cheeseburgers and half a dozen milkshakes per evening and training hard, I bulked up swiftly, moving from the mid-heavy category (up to 198 pounds) to the heavy (up to 240 pounds) to the superheavy (no limit). I told my parents about this—as I told them almost everything—and they were a bit disturbed, which surprised me, because my father was no lightweight and weighed around 250 himself.1
 
I had done some weight lifting as a medical student in London in the 1950s. I belonged to a Jewish sports club, the Maccabi, and we would have power-lifting contests with other sports clubs, the three competition lifts being the curl, the bench press, and the squat, or deep knee bend.
 
Very different from these were the three Olympic lifts— the press, the snatch, and the clean and jerk—and here we had world-class lifters in our little gym. One of them, Ben Helfgott, had captained the British weight-lifting team in the 1956 Olympic Games. He became a good friend (and even now, in his eighties, he is still extraordinarily strong and agile).2  I tried the Olympic lifts, but I was too clumsy. My snatches, in particular, were dangerous to those around me, and I was told in no uncertain terms to get off the Olympic lifting platform and go back to power lifting.
 
 
The Central YMCA in San Francisco had particularly good weight-lifting facilities. The first time I went there, my eye was caught by a bench-press bar loaded with nearly 400 pounds. No one at the Maccabi could bench-press anything like this, and when I looked around, I saw no one in the Y who looked up to such a weight. No one, at least, until a short but hugely broad and thick-chested man, a white-haired gorilla, hobbled into the gym—he was slightly bowlegged—lay down on the bench, and, by way of warmup, did a dozen easy reps with the bench-press bar. He added weights for subsequent sets, going to nearly 500 pounds. I had a Polaroid camera with me and took a picture as he rested between sets. I got talking to him later; he was very genial. He told me that his name was Karl Norberg, that he was Swedish, that he had worked all his life as a longshoreman, and that he was now seventy years old. His phenomenal strength had come to him naturally; his only exercise had been hefting boxes and barrels at the docks, often one on each shoulder, boxes and barrels which no “normal” person could even lift off the ground.
 
I felt inspired by Karl and determined to lift greater pound- ages myself, to work on the one lift I was already fairly good at—the squat. Training intensively, even obsessively, at a small gym in San Rafael, I worked up to doing five sets of five reps with 555 pounds every fifth day. The symmetry of this pleased me but caused amusement at the gym—“Sacks and his fives.” I didn’t realize how exceptional this was until another lifter encouraged me to have a go at the California squat record. I did so, diffidently, and to my delight was able to set a new record, a squat with a 600-pound bar on my shoulders. This was to serve as my introduction to the power-lifting world; a weight-lifting record is equivalent, in these circles, to publishing a scientific paper or a book in academia.
 
 
1. My father would eat continually in the presence of food but go all day without food if it was not available; it is similar with me. In the absence of internal controls, I have to have external ones. I have fixed routines for eating and dislike deviations from them.
2. Helfgott’s achievement was all the more extraordinary because he had survived the camps at Buchenwald and Theresienstadt.

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