Members save with free shipping everyday! See details
English0385352565
27.0
In Stock
Overview
From the bestselling author of Gratitude and Musicophilia, a collection of essays that displays Oliver Sacks's passionate engagement with the most compelling ideas of human endeavor: evolution, creativity, memory, time, consciousness, and experience.
Oliver Sacks, scientist and storyteller, is beloved by readers for the extraordinary neurological case histories (Awakenings, An Anthropologist on Mars) in which he explored many now-familiar disorders—autism, Tourette syndrome, face blindness. He was also a memoirist who wrote with honesty and humor about the remarkable experiences that shaped him (Uncle Tungsten, On the Move, Gratitude). In the pieces that comprise The River of Consciousness (many first published in The New York Review of Books, among other places), Dr. Sacks takes on evolution, botany, chemistry, medicine, neuroscience, and the arts, and calls upon his great scientific and creative heroes—above all, Darwin, Freud, and William James. For Sacks, these thinkers were constant companions from an early age. The questions they explored—the meaning of evolution, the roots of creativity, and the nature of consciousness—lie at the heart of science and of this book. The River of Consciousness demonstrates Sacks's unparalleled ability to make unexpected connections, his sheer joy in knowledge, and his unceasing, timeless endeavor to understand what makes us human.
Oliver Sacks was a physician, writer, and professor of neurology. Born in London in 1933, he moved to New York City in 1965, where he launched his medical career and began writing case studies of his patients. Called the "poet laureate of medicine" by The New York Times, Sacks is the author of more than a dozen books, including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Musicophilia, Awakenings (which inspired an Oscar-nominated film and a play by Harold Pinter), On the Move, and Gratitude. He was the recipient of many awards and honorary degrees and was made a Commander of the British Empire in 2008 for services to medicine. He died in 2015.
Darwin and the Meaning of Flowers Speed Sentience: The Mental Lives of Plants and Worms The Other Road: Freud as Neurologist The Fallibility of Memory Mishearings The Creative Self A General Feeling of Disorder The River of Consciousness Scotoma: Forgetting and Neglect in Science
Awakenings—which inspired the major motion picture—is the remarkable story of a group of patients who
contracted sleeping-sickness during the great epidemic just after World War I. Frozen for decades in a trance-like state, these men and women were given up ...
From the acclaimed author of Cambridge comes an ambitious, formally inventive, and intensely moving evocation
of the scattered offspring of Africa. It begins in a year of failing crops and desperate foolishness, which forces a father to sell his three ...
On the island of Willow Springs, off the Georgia coast, the powers of healer Mama
Day are tested by her great niece, Cocoa, a stubbornly emancipated woman endangered by the island's darker forces. A powerful generational saga at once tender ...
The internationally acclaimed author of the L.A. Quartet and The Underworld USA Trilogy, James Ellroy,
presents another literary masterpiece, this time a true crime murder mystery about his own mother.In 1958 Jean Ellroy was murdered, her body dumped on a roadway in ...
With imaginative lushness and narrative elan, Mehta provides a novel that combines Indian storytelling with
thoroughly modern perceptions into the nature of love--love both carnal and sublime, treacherous and redeeming. "Conveys a world that is spiritual, foreign, and entirely accessible."--Vanity ...
Joan Didion's electrifying first novel is a haunting portrait of a marriage whose wrong turns
and betrayals are at once absolutely idiosyncratic and a razor-sharp commentary on the history of California. Everett McClellan and his wife, Lily, are the great-grandchildren ...
Now a Netflix Original DocumentaryAmerica was once celebrated for and defined by its large and
prosperous middle class. Now, this middle class is shrinking, a new oligarchy is rising, and the country faces its greatest wealth disparity in eighty years. ...
Like The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, this is a fascinating voyage
into a strange and wonderful land, a provocative meditation on communication, biology, adaptation, and culture. In Seeing Voices, Oliver Sacks turns his attention to the subject ...
