On the move: a life by Oliver Sacks

Correspondence to Dr Neil Watson, Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH16 4SA, UK; [email protected]

The Edinburgh Neurology Book Club recently read the late Professor Oliver Sacks’ autobiography, On the Move: A Life. Many of us have read (and reviewed^{1 2}) his works. We wanted to learn about the man himself. He did not disappoint us.

This is an unflinchingly honest memoir from a singular character. As his schoolteacher put it, ‘Sacks will go far, if he does not go too far’. He was many things: English, Jewish, an expat in the USA, homosexual and mostly celibate, harrowed by contemporary attitudes (his mother wished he ‘had never been born’) and laws (same-sex relations between UK men were only partially legalised in 1967). He was a record-breaking powerlifter, a motorbike fanatic, a recovered amphetamine addict, a lifelong wild swimmer and prosopagnosia sufferer. Besides these, he was perhaps the most famous neurologist of all time.

Sacks’ career was unorthodox. He portrays himself as a rebel, not out of any predisposition for troublemaking but from fascination with what he saw in his practice and his own methods. His...