The River of Consciousness

Produktbeschreibung

Two weeks before his death, Oliver Sacks outlined his plans for the last book he would oversee, The River of Consciousness. As an eminent neurologist and highly regarded throughout his life for his far-reaching examinations of the human mind, this book marks Sacks' magnificent return. Known for his investigations into the brain, this is Sacks' chance to explore his fascination with questions posed by all the sciences. It is this unending passion and appetite for investigation that Sacks will be remembered for and which informs a work that explores not only the nature of the human mind but of all life. Sacks seeks the companionship of some of the greatest scientific minds we know and his own personal heroes, in Darwin and Freud, to illuminate his study of botany, evolution, chemistry, medicine, the arts, and neuroscience. The culmination of a lifetime of research, thought and meditation, The River of Consciousness is an exceptional piece of writing and a testament to one man's timeless project to understand what makes us human. 

Kritik

Reading a book published after its authors death, especially if he is as prodigiously alive on every page as Oliver Sacks, as curious, avid and thrillingly fluent, brings both the joy of hearing from him again, and the regret of knowing it will likely be the last time . . . [The] combination of wonder, passion and gratitude never seemed to flag in Sacks's life; everything he wrote was lit with it. But it was his openness to new ideas and experiences, and his vision of change as the most human of biological processes that synthesized all of his work Nicole Krauss The New York Times Book Review 

Autoreninfo

Oliver Sacks was born in 1933 in London and was educated at the Queen's College, Oxford. He completed his medical training at San Francisco's Mount Zion Hospital and at UCLA before moving to New York, where he soon encountered the patients whom he would write about in his book Awakenings.

Dr Sacks spent almost fifty years working as a neurologist and wrote many books, including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Musicophilia, and Hallucinations, about the strange neurological predicaments and conditions of his patients. The New York Times referred to him as 'the poet laureate of medicine', and over the years he received many awards, including honours from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Royal College of Physicians. In 2008, he was appointed Commander of the British Empire. His memoir, On the Move, was published shortly before his death in August 2015.