Oliver Sacks's Blog, page 10
January 15, 2013
Happy 50th, New York Review of Books!
Dr. Sacks has just returned from Iceland, where he spent New Year’s Eve in Reykjavik with friends, and also visited the unique Herring Era Museum in Siglufjordur, the northernmost town in Iceland. Herring heaven!
PS: Hooray! A new book by Neil Shubin (Your Inner Fish) has just been published: The Universe Within. This book is, quite literally, cosmic: a profound story told with Shubin’s usual clarity and passion.
December 12, 2012
Happy Holidays!
12/12/12
Dear Readers,
Thanks to you, Hallucinations is a New York Times bestseller!
Coming up this week:
Dr. Sacks discusses his take on Eben Alexander’s book Proof of Heaven, online at The Atlantic now.
On Dr. Sacks’s YouTube channel, you can hear him talk about out-of-body experiences in a new video.
And on Sunday, December 16, Dr. Sacks writes about large-type books in the New York Times Book Review.
For the holidays, we’d just like to quote a writer friend who says, “Give books!” Any format will do—large type, e-book, Braille book, audiobook, even an old-fashioned paper book. If you’re looking for ideas, here are a couple of books Dr. Sacks particularly enjoyed this year:
God’s Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine by Victoria Sweet.
A Rum Affair: A True Story of Botanical Fraud by Karl Sabbagh.
Curious Behavior: Yawning, Laughing, Hiccuping, and Beyond by Robert Provine.
Happy holidays from all of us!
Oliver Sacks, Kate Edgar, and Hailey Wojcik
(Thanks to our good friend Marsha for the cool octopod ornament. Our office tree is a fern, of course, Phlebodium aureum, a lovely specimen from the Morris Arboretum. Note its traditional medicinal uses in this Wikipedia entry. Hmm. We’ll be looking into that.)
November 8, 2012
Hallucinations now available as book, e-book, and audiobook!
What an exciting week! Hallucinations is now on sale (as a book, e-book, and audiobook) in the US, UK, Australia, and New Zealand.
Over the next few weeks, you will likely hear Dr. Sacks talk about the book on your local radio station, on shows like “Fresh Air,” “To the Best of Our Knowledge,” “Science Friday,” and many others. Podcasts of these and other interviews abound on npr.com, and if you Google “oliver sacks hallucinations podcast” you will find more. And we love today’s review in the Guardian, by Will Self.
The New York Times featured this op-ed by Dr. Sacks a couple of days ago, on the stigma of hallucinations.
On Barnes&Noble.com, you can see what Dr. Sacks himself is reading these days, as well as what inspires him most. And if you are in New York City, you can attend his reading and booksigning at Barnes & Noble’s Union Square store the evening of November 28.
Tomorrow night, Friday, November 9, 2012, at 8 pm EST, catch the live webcast of his talk, with John Hockenberry, followed by live Q&A, at Cooper Union’s Great Hall.
PS: Thanks so much for the many expressions of concern we received in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. Thankfully, we were not flooded in our part of NYC and only had to cope with no electricity for a week. But many other New Yorkers and East Coasters were not so lucky. Please consider helping them out; there any many organizations working on hurricane relief which will send your donations to people in need.
October 10, 2012
Hot off the press! Hallucinations, phantoms, and more
We here in the Sacks office are eagerly awaiting publication of Dr. Sacks’s new book,Hallucinations. The very first copy reached his hands today!
In the US and Canada, as well as UK, Australia and New Zealand, Hallucinations will be available on November 6. You can preorder it now at your favorite bookseller. *
Hallucinations are often considered to portend madness or something dire happening to the brain—even though the vast majority of hallucinations have much more benign origins. In this book, Dr. Sacks investigates a whole range of uncanny events including hallucinations of sights and scents and sounds (or just feeling “a presence”), seeing one’s own double, even out-of-body experiences and phantom limbs. Here’s a short video of Dr. Sacks on phantom limbs.
Oh, yes, and if we might ask you for a big favor: please tell your friends, lots and lots of them, about the new book! If you like it (we’re sure you will), it would make a pretty swell holiday gift for just about anyone who reads. (It’s also available in e-book and audiobook format.) We’ll be in your debt, as always.
If you would like updates on Dr. Sacks’s tour dates and other activities, please sign up for ourTwitter or Facebook news.
Happy reading!
*Attention, Dutch readers! Thanks to a remarkably efficient translator and publisher, the Dutch edition, Hallucinaties, is already in bookstores in the Netherlands (one of our favorite countries, and not only because of the great herring there).
August 20, 2012
What I Learned from Hallucinogens
As some of you asked after our last newsletter, how come the famously computer-illiterate Dr. Sacks has all this social media??? That would be us, the Sacks Office (a.k.a. Kate and Hailey). He gives us the info, and we translate it into computerese. Sometimes we tweet things he says at the office, sometimes he writes out notes for us. It’s true: he won’t touch a computer. He’s always been a seriously fast two-fingered typist with his IBM Selectric (that’s a typewriter, for those of you under 40). But these days, he’s gone back to the tried and true method of fountain pen and yellow paper. More on this next month.
August 3, 2012
Björk, Musicophilia, and Face Blindness
A sneak preview of Hallucinations will run in the New Yorker’s issue dated August 27th, on stands August 20, 2012 (barring last-minute scheduling changes by the magazine). The book itself will be published November 6, but you can preorder it now.
Also this Sunday, August 5th, CBS’s “60 Minutes” will rebroadcast their story about faceblindness, featuring Dr. Sacks, artist Chuck Close, and others who can’t recognize their own friends. More about this on Dr. Sacks’s YouTube channel, or in The Mind’s Eye, where Dr. Sacks writes about his lifelong inability to remember faces, and how he copes with that. He might recognize Björk, but only if she’s looking like this:
Dr. Sacks might seem to be an unlikely Björk fan, but then again, Björk’s latest album, Biophilia, was inspired in part by his book Musicophilia. For both of them, music is a powerful lens to look at the beauty of science and art. Last week, Dr. Sacks (famously computer illiterate though he is!) was introduced to Björk’s Biophilia iPad app, and was enchanted by it.
If you are in the UK or Europe, tune in to BBC Channel 4 on August 27 for a new film about music in nature and what music means for humans—featuring David Attenborough, Björk and Dr. Sacks. (The show is not yet scheduled for US distribution, but if we hear anything, we’ll let you know.)
Finally, if you live in the San Francisco Bay Area: Tickets are now on sale for Dr. Sacks’s event at City Arts and Lectures, Monday, November 12, 2012.
June 21, 2012
Linnaeus and (Out of) Body Experiences
Hallucinations has gone off to the printers, and will be published on November 6! Here’s what the jacket looks like, thanks to designer Hailey Wojcik:
Dr. Sacks just returned from Stockholm, where he took part in some experiments on altered body image with Henrik Ehrsson’s lab at the Karolinska Institute. You’ll be able to read about his experiences with a third arm and the “Barbie doll illusion” in the final chapter of Hallucinations.
Dr. Sacks also headed to Hammarby, the home and gardens of the great eighteenth-century botanist and zoologist Carl Linnaeus. (Yes, he invented the binomial system of classification for animals and plants that we still use.) Spring had just come to Uppsala, and the gardens were in full flower. Jesper Kårehad, the resident botanist, showed him around:
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Here is Linnaeus’s house, and the beautiful St. Lucy’s cherry, Prunus mahaleb, he planted two and a half centuries ago:
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Inside the house is Linnaeus’s study, still wallpapered floor to ceiling with botanical illustrations from his time.
Sweden is rich in chemical heritage, too. A few years ago, Dr. Sacks visited the town of Köping and the pharmacy of Carl Wilhelm Scheele, who discovered oxygen. He also made a pilgrimage to the tiny village of Ytterby, whose mine gave its name to no less than four elements: erbium, terbium, yttrium, and ytterbium.
Hej då!
May 16, 2012
The Man Who Forgot How to Read
The film also features novelist Howard Engel and famed chef Danny Delcambre, along with Dr. Sacks.Broadcast times on BBC World News (a separate channel from BBC America) are Saturday, May 19 at 02:10 GMT and 15:10 GMT; Sunday, May 20 at 09:10 GMT and 21:10 GMT—that’s Greenwich Mean Time, not to be confused with British Summer Time.
Sorry, New Yorkers, BBC Worldwide News is not yet available on the island of Manhattan unless you have satellite tv—but it is available now throughout the United States (and virtually everywhere else in the world).
But there are still tickets left to hear Dr. Sacks speak in New York City at the World Science Festival, June 1, 2012 at 8:00 pm. He’ll be talking on the therapeutic power of music. Check out the rest of the Festival, too!
April 13, 2012
Giving the Gift of Music
This week, something extraordinary happened. Director Michael Rossato-Bennett posted a clip from his new documentary, “Alive Inside,” on YouTube. Over the next couple of hours, he watched the number of views climb from 300 to three hundred thousand. As of this writing, five days later, over three million people have watched it. It’s been covered by USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, ABC News, the LA Times, the Guardian, and news organizations in Brazil, Canada, and Pakistan. And the film hasn’t even premiered yet.
What’s attracting all this attention? Music therapy, and the extraordinary effect it has on a 94-year-old called Henry. Without music, Henry is uncommunicative and cannot recognize his own daughter. With music, he comes alive, reminiscing about his favorite Cab Calloway performances. His eyes glow, he speaks with energy and passion.
If you haven’t seen this clip, you can find it here. Pass it along!
The full documentary, which premieres next week at the Rubin Museum in New York, is about a wonderful project devoted to improving the lives of elderly people with various conditions—especially those, like Henry, with dementia, as well as people with cancer, depression, paralysis, and a host of other conditions. The idea couldn’t be simpler: load an iPod with music that has meaning for the individual, so they can access that music to enliven, engage, and uplift.
You can help transform the life of someone like Henry by donating an old or new iPod. For more information, go to the Music and Memory website. Learn how to pick the right music and set up an iPod for your loved one, or how to bring this program to your neighbors.
As Dr. Sacks has written in Musicophilia, music can be more therapeutic than any medication. Music, he says,”brings back the feeling of life when nothing else can.”
Music is inexpensive, easily available, and (unlike drugs) it has no side effects! Let’s keep this going—tell a friend, and ask them to spread the word, too.
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March 9, 2012
Ferns, chocolate, and capybaras
Spring is on the way, and it's time to take a journey to the lovely warm climes of Oaxaca, Mexico! (We pronounce it "Wah-HAH-ka.")
Dr. Sacks's Oaxaca Journal has just been republished in a beautiful Vintage paperback edition, complete with the original fern drawings by Dick Rauh.
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That's Dr. Sacks on the cover, writing in his journal in the shade of a nopal cactus. He may be writing about the history of chocolate or chili peppers, his ferny childhood at Kew Gardens, the gentle capybara, the violent colonization of Mexico, or its glorious pre-Conquest architecture. Or perhaps he is musing on botanical hallucinogens or the strange habits of fern devotees and birders scouting for new species.
As the New York Times said of this book, "Sacks's boundless curiosity is always a reward." (Did we mention that this book could completely solve your Mother's Day shopping duties?)
We hope you love your local librarians as much as we do. As a salute to libraries large and small, we will donate a hardcover copy of Oaxaca Journal to the first ten libraries we hear from (please send in a request on library letterhead via email—sorry, we can only send within the United States).
Bon voyage!
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