Letters 

(A memoir of Dr. Oliver Sacks as told through his personal correspondence) 

Edited by Kate Edgar.

Like many, Dr. Oliver Sacks first came to my attention as a result of the popular Hollywood movie Awakenings that starred Robert DeNiro and Robin Williams. Awakenings was based upon a book of the same name that Dr. Sacks had written in 1973 about his experiences treating patients who were victims of a post-encephalitis lethargica epidemic that happened during the 1920s. Both in the book and in the movie, these patients were shown to be locked into a series of contorted, rigid positions, seemingly unable to move of their own volition. Through the introduction of an experimental drug called L-Dopa, these patients gained some motor control back. Some even were able to freely move about again. Unfortunately, the healing benefits of L-Dopa were short-lived and slowly but surely, each patient was drawn back into their former rigid states. In the movie, Robert DeNiro played one of the patients while Robin Williams starred as Dr. Sacks. One of the reasons that Awakenings resonated so well with the public was because of how Dr. Sacks approached his patients. He treated them all with dignity, courtesy and respect. He told their individual stories and humanized those who had only ever known marginalization. *You can watch the trailer for the movie Awakenings here.

Dr. Sacks became as famous for being a storyteller as he did for his clinical work with all manner of patients and their brains. Before his career was through (he died in 2015), Dr. Oliver Sacks had told the stories of those with Tourette’s Syndrome, Autism Spectrum Disorder, Parkinson’s Disease, Migraine sufferers and many more with brain-related diseases, syndromes and afflictions. He authored books on those topics, as well as many others. Throughout his career, Dr. Sacks maintained a healthy fascination with the mysteries of the brain and the human mind. He was a frequent book/essay/article reviewer for the New York Times Book Review, as well as a regular contributor to the Times’ Letters to the Editor feature. Fortunately for the rest of us, people like Dr. Sacks exist. Not only was he interested in this subject matter for professional reasons, he was also someone who possessed a voracious urge to read and to learn as much as he could about all manner of phenomena in this world. Furthermore, he was not content to simply store this knowledge in his own brain. Instead, he possessed an equally strong desire to put his thoughts down on paper so as to help the rest of us learn and grown and become better, more compassionate people ourselves. This desire to express his thoughts in written form resulted in not only dozens of published books but also thousands upon thousands of letters that he wrote to friends, family members, medical colleagues, patients, fans/critics of his books and so on. Dr. Sacks found time to write letters almost every day of his life. Upon his death, his editor Kate Edgar commented that he had over seventy banker boxes filled with a lifetime of correspondence. Because he was such a prodigious letter writer, Kate Edgar and those left in his inner circle of family and friends, felt that one way of telling his life story was to do so by simply using the very letters he wrote throughout his life as a way to structure it all. So that is what they did. Their efforts have resulted in the book I am profiling today that is simply entitled Letters.   

Letters begins with correspondence between Dr. Sacks and his parents in 1960. Dr. Sacks was born and raised in England. However, at age 27 he emigrated to Canada, before eventually arriving in California (where he did his medical school training) and then permanently settling in New York City (where he spent the majority of his career and life). Everything that happens to him as he discovers his way in the world geographically, politically, professionally and personally is told in one letter after another to all manner of interesting people. There is no narrative prose at all in this 694-page memoir, save for some contextual footnotes added by Kate Edgar along the way. It is all letters. What emerges is the story of a life well-lived and of a thoroughly decent human being. I never failed to be impressed at the positivity he possessed and how respectful he was to all he corresponded with regardless if they were children, family members of patients or Nobel Prize winning scientists. Dr. Oliver Sacks treated everyone with the same level of interest and enthusiasm and made them all feel special. Thus I can state with clear conviction how refreshing a book this was to read. In our current times, when there is so much negativity, misinformation and mean-spiritedness everywhere we turn, it was a distinct pleasure to read about a man who seemed so interested in everything and everyone and who, as a result, became such an interesting person himself. It pleases me to no end that someone of his intellectual calibre opted to dedicate his life to those who had spent their lives suffering in pain, often shunned and/or mocked by society, in the hope that by telling their stories he would bring some measure of dignity to their lives. Dr. Oliver Sacks was a good person. That counts for a lot when the measure of a man is laid out before us as it was in this book.

While my introduction to the world of Dr. Oliver Sacks may have come through the movie Awakenings, my connection with him came later via a book he wrote called An Anthropologist on Mars. This book told the stories of seven extraordinary people who functioned outside of what society would consider to be “normal” behaviour. One of the people he profiled was a woman named Temple Grandin. Grandin was the person featured in the seventh and closing chapter which was entitled The Anthropologist on Mars. Temple Grandin was/is autistic. She gained fame for her work with cattle and slaughterhouses. But what mattered most to me was her description of how she drew meaning from the world around her. She eventually published a book of her own called Thinking in Pictures. In this book, Grandin described how, unlike most people, she did not understand how to operate successfully in the world through language. Instead, she understood the world around her through visual imagery. The world was like a film that she studied in order to know how to act in social settings. Words meant little to her. Pictures meant everything. Why this became important to me was that early on in my teaching career, I had a student who also thought in pictures, just like Grandin did. This student was a mystery and a puzzle when he first arrived. But through the combined efforts of Dr. Oliver Sacks’ books and Temple Grandin’s Thinking in Pictures, I was granted a pathway forward to helping my own student. What began as a mystery soon became one of the most satisfying experiences I ever had as a teacher. Not only did that student end up having a really good year in our classroom, we are still in touch via social media today and I am happy to report that he is living a great and full life and is, in fact, thriving. 

It is important to tell stories about all aspects of our world, even those we don’t often experience or profess to understand. By being open to the mysteries of life, we allow ourselves to expand the limits of our imaginations and of our hearts. Not everyone in our world has to be “normal” to hold great value. Each one of us is important and worthy of dignity and empathy and kindness and of love. Each one. That message comes through loud and clear in the letters that Dr. Oliver Sacks wrote throughout the whole of his life. There is a saying that goes “You are what you eat”. In the case of Dr. Sacks, he was what he read and wrote and the gentleness with which he treated those whose path crossed with his. 

From reading this memoir, I have decided upon a new project for myself and, by extension, for anyone of you who may be interested. In the letters he wrote during all stages of his life, one of the things he continually fell back upon was his love of literature. In letter after letter, he used phrases such as “I was just reading so-and-so’s book. It is fantastic!” or “I wanted to write to you to tell you how much I enjoyed your latest book” or “I was thinking of the poem by Auden or Gunn or Neruda or whoever and thought of you”, etc. Of course, Dr. Sacks, being a neurologist, read many books on the subject of the brain and commented regularly about those, more professional, books, as well. In any case, I have gone through the entire book of Letters and have pulled out every reference he made to a book, a poem, an essay or an article with the intention of reading them all. Then, if all goes well, I will write up a short review that gives context to what the book meant to Dr. Sacks, as well as, a brief overview of the work itself, followed up by my own thoughts, for what those may be worth. There are over 200 books, poems, essays and articles mentioned. I hope to cover them all in the months and years to come. I figure that if these works inspired a man who, in turn, inspired me and countless others then, it will be a good exercise to find out what they were about and why Dr. Sacks held them in such esteem. You are all welcome to come along for the ride if you wish. It will be wonderful to see you there.

The link to the official website for Dr. Oliver Sacks can be found here.

The link to the official website for Temple Grandin can be found here.

The link to the page where I will post each book review (which I will call the Library of Dr. Oliver Sacks) can be found here. *I will link to that same page at the end of each subsequent book review that follows.
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