LETTERS

Oliver Sacks s Letters isn t a book of the year it s a book for a lifetime Keep this by your side dip into it be reminded of the wonders of our shared humanity Erica Wagner Books of the year 2024 New StatesmanA New Yorker and New Statesman Book of the Year 2024 Oliver Sacks one of the great humanists of our age who describes himself in these pages as a philosophical physician and an astronomer of the inward wrote to an eclectic array of family and friends Most were scientists artists and writers even statesmen Francis Crick Antonio Damasio Jane Goodall W H Auden Susan Sontag Stephen Jay Gould Björk and his first cousin Abba Eban But many of the most eloquent letters in this collection are addressed to the ordinary people who wrote to him with their odd symptoms and questions to whom he responds with a sense of generosity and wonder With some correspondents Sacks shares his struggle for recognition and acceptance both as a physician and as a gay man providing intimate accounts as well of his passions for competitive weightlifting motorcycles botany and music With others he chronicles his penchant for testing the boundaries of authority the discovery of his writer s voice and his explosive seasons of discovery with