Download or read book Uncle Tungsten written by Oliver Sacks and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-12-11 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Long before Oliver Sacks became a distinguished neurologist and bestselling writer, he was a small English boy fascinated by metals–also by chemical reactions (the louder and smellier the better), photography, squids and cuttlefish, H.G. Wells, and the periodic table. In this endlessly charming and eloquent memoir, the author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Awakenings chronicles his love affair with science and the magnificently odd and sometimes harrowing childhood in which that love affair unfolded. In Uncle Tungsten we meet Sacks’ extraordinary family, from his surgeon mother (who introduces the fourteen-year-old Oliver to the art of human dissection) and his father, a family doctor who imbues in his son an early enthusiasm for housecalls, to his “Uncle Tungsten,” whose factory produces tungsten-filament lightbulbs. We follow the young Oliver as he is exiled at the age of six to a grim, sadistic boarding school to escape the London Blitz, and later watch as he sets about passionately reliving the exploits of his chemical heroes–in his own home laboratory. Uncle Tungsten is a crystalline view of a brilliant young mind springing to life, a story of growing up which is by turns elegiac, comic, and wistful, full of the electrifying joy of discovery.
Download or read book On the Move written by Oliver Sacks and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2015-04-28 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A “wonderful memoir” (Los Angeles Times) about a brilliantly unconventional physician and writer, a man who has illuminated the many ways that the brain makes us human. • “Intimate.... Brim[s] with life and affection.” —The New York Times When Oliver Sacks was twelve years old, a perceptive schoolmaster wrote: “Sacks will go far, if he does not go too far.” It is now abundantly clear that Sacks has never stopped going. With unbridled honesty and humor, Sacks writes about the passions that have driven his life—from motorcycles and weight lifting to neurology and poetry. He writes about his love affairs, both romantic and intellectual; his guilt over leaving his family to come to America; his bond with his schizophrenic brother; and the writers and scientists—W. H. Auden, Gerald M. Edelman, Francis Crick—who have influenced his work.
Download or read book Everything in Its Place written by Oliver Sacks and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2019-04-23 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the legendary author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: a volume of essays on everything from primordial life and the mysteries of the brain to the ancient ginkgo and the power of the written word. "Magical . . . [Everything in Its Place] showcases the neurologist's infinitely curious mind."—People Magazine In this volume, Oliver Sacks examines the many passions that defined his life--both as a doctor engaged with the central questions of human existence and as a polymath conversant in all the sciences. Everything in Its Place brings together writings on a rich variety of topics. Why do humans need gardens? How, and when, does a physician tell his patient she has Alzheimer's? What is social media doing to our brains? In several of the compassionate case histories included here, we see Sacks consider the enigmas of depression, psychosis, and schizophrenia for the first time. In others, he returns to conditions that have long fascinated him: Tourette's syndrome, aging, dementia, and hallucinations. In counterpoint to these elegant investigations of what makes us human, this volume also includes pieces that celebrate Sacks's love of the natural world--and his final meditations on life in the twenty-first century.
Download or read book The Mind s Eye written by Oliver Sacks and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-10-26 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Mind’s Eye, Oliver Sacks tells the stories of people who are able to navigate the world and communicate with others despite losing what many of us consider indispensable senses and abilities: the power of speech, the capacity to recognize faces, the sense of three-dimensional space, the ability to read, the sense of sight. For all of these people, the challenge is to adapt to a radically new way of being in the world. There is Lilian, a concert pianist who becomes unable to read music and is eventually unable even to recognize everyday objects, and Sue, a neurobiologist who has never seen in three dimensions, until she suddenly acquires stereoscopic vision in her fifties. There is Pat, who reinvents herself as a loving grandmother and active member of her community, despite the fact that she has aphasia and cannot utter a sentence, and Howard, a prolific novelist who must find a way to continue his life as a writer even after a stroke destroys his ability to read. And there is Dr. Sacks himself, who tells the story of his own eye cancer and the bizarre and disconcerting effects of losing vision to one side. Sacks explores some very strange paradoxes—people who can see perfectly well but cannot recognize their own children, and blind people who become hyper-visual or who navigate by “tongue vision.” He also considers more fundamental questions: How do we see? How do we think? How important is internal imagery—or vision, for that matter? Why is it that, although writing is only five thousand years old, humans have a universal, seemingly innate, potential for reading? The Mind’s Eye is a testament to the complexity of vision and the brain and to the power of creativity and adaptation. And it provides a whole new perspective on the power of language and communication, as we try to imagine what it is to see with another person’s eyes, or another person’s mind.
Download or read book Insomniac City written by Bill Hayes and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-02-14 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Amazon's Best Biographies and Memoirs of the Year List A moving celebration of what Bill Hayes calls "the evanescent, the eavesdropped, the unexpected" of life in New York City, and an intimate glimpse of his relationship with the late Oliver Sacks. "A beautifully written once-in-a-lifetime book, about love, about life, soul, and the wonderful loving genius Oliver Sacks, and New York, and laughter and all of creation."--Anne Lamott Bill Hayes came to New York City in 2009 with a one-way ticket and only the vaguest idea of how he would get by. But, at forty-eight years old, having spent decades in San Francisco, he craved change. Grieving over the death of his partner, he quickly discovered the profound consolations of the city's incessant rhythms, the sight of the Empire State Building against the night sky, and New Yorkers themselves, kindred souls that Hayes, a lifelong insomniac, encountered on late-night strolls with his camera. And he unexpectedly fell in love again, with his friend and neighbor, the writer and neurologist Oliver Sacks, whose exuberance--"I don't so much fear death as I do wasting life," he tells Hayes early on--is captured in funny and touching vignettes throughout. What emerges is a portrait of Sacks at his most personal and endearing, from falling in love for the first time at age seventy-five to facing illness and death (Sacks died of cancer in August 2015). Insomniac City is both a meditation on grief and a celebration of life. Filled with Hayes's distinctive street photos of everyday New Yorkers, the book is a love song to the city and to all who have felt the particular magic and solace it offers.
Download or read book The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat And Other Clinical Tales written by Oliver Sacks and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1998 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores neurological disorders and their effects upon the minds and lives of those affected with an entertaining voice.
Download or read book Rock Star written by Geoffrey Notkin and published by . This book was released on 2012-06-01 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The eagerly-awaited personal memoir by award-winning author Geoffrey Notkin, and star of the popular television adventure series, Meteorite Men. A science writer and television host with a rock ’n’ roll heart describes his exciting, and sometimes astonishing, quest for meaning and understanding in an unexplainable universe. From the smoking volcanoes of Iceland to the sunblasted wasteland of Chile’s Atacama Desert, and the Australian Outback to the Siberian Arctic, Geoffrey Notkin recounts a forty-year odyssey of adventure that takes him to some of the world’s strangest and wildest places—where music and meteorites are often the only sign posts. Fourteen years in the making, Rock Star, chronicles Geoff's incredible adventures across four continents in search of elusive space rocks, his career as a rock 'n' roll musician, and his childhood in an oppressive British public school. It is populated by a cast of fascinating, larger-than-life characters, and relates hilarious behind-the-scenes stories about the making of Geoff's numerous TV shows. A unique, unforgettable, and beautifully-told story of adventure, passion, determination, danger, frustration, and ultimate triumph.
Download or read book The River of Consciousness written by Oliver Sacks and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2017-10-24 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bestselling author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, a collection of essays that displays Oliver Sacks's passionate engagement with the most compelling ideas of human endeavor: evolution, creativity, memory, time, consciousness, and experience. "Curious, avid and thrillingly fluent." —The New York Times Book Review In the pieces that comprise The River of Consciousness, Dr. Sacks takes on evolution, botany, chemistry, medicine, neuroscience, and the arts, and calls upon his great scientific and creative heroes--above all, Darwin, Freud, and William James. For Sacks, these thinkers were constant companions from an early age. The questions they explored--the meaning of evolution, the roots of creativity, and the nature of consciousness--lie at the heart of science and of this book. The River of Consciousness demonstrates Sacks's unparalleled ability to make unexpected connections, his sheer joy in knowledge, and his unceasing, timeless endeavor to understand what makes us human.
Download or read book Oaxaca Journal written by Oliver Sacks and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-03-06 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From "the poet laureate of medicine" and national bestselling author of Awakenings comes a fascinating investigation of Southern Mexico that explores the origins of chocolate and mescal, pre-Columbian culture and hallucinogens, and the peculiar passions of botanists. "Light and fast-moving. . . . Among the botanical and anthropological observations, one catches glimpses of Sacks's inner life: his preoccupation with dualities, his nearly Victorian sense of modesty, his fascination with the world around him." —The New Yorker Since childhood, Oliver Sacks was fascinated by ferns: an ancient class of plants able to survive and adapt in many climates. Along with a delightful group of fellow fern aficionados—mathematicians, poets, artists, and assorted botanists and birders—he embarked on an exploration of Southern Mexico, a region that is also rich in human history and culture. Combining Sacks's enthusiasm for natural history and the richness of humanity with his sharp and observant eye for detail, Oaxaca Journal is a rare treat.
Download or read book Suggestions to Medical Authors and A M A Style Book written by American Medical Association and published by . This book was released on 1919 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Story of CO2 written by Geoffrey Ozin and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2020-11-03 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The climate crisis requires that we drastically reduce carbon dioxide emissions across all sectors of society. The Story of CO2 contributes to this vital conversation by highlighting the cutting-edge science and emerging technologies – a number of which are already commercially available – that can transform carbon dioxide into a myriad of products such as feedstock chemicals, polymers, pharmaceuticals, and fuels. This approach allows us to reconsider CO2 as a resource, and to add "carbon capture and use" to our other tools in the fight against catastrophic climate change. The Story of CO2 explores all aspects of carbon dioxide, from the atomic to the universal perspective, and takes the reader on an epic journey into our physical world, starting from the moment of the Big Bang, all the way to the present world in which atmospheric CO2 concentrations continue to grow. This story seeks to inspire readers with the latest carbon utilization technologies and explain how they fit within the broader context of carbon mitigation strategies in the shift towards a sustainable energy economy.
Download or read book Oliver Sacks The Last Interview written by Oliver Sacks and published by Melville House. This book was released on 2016-11-15 with total page 99 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An extraordinary collection of interviews with the beloved doctor and author, whose research and books inspired generations of readers Oliver Sacks—called “the poet laureate of medicine” by the New York Times—illuminated the mysteries of the brain for a wide audience in a series of richly acclaimed books, including Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and numerous New Yorker articles. In this collection of interviews, Sacks is at his most candid and disarming, rich with insights about his life and work. Any reader of Sacks will find in this book an entirely new way of looking at a brilliant writer.
Download or read book Vintage Sacks written by Oliver Sacks and published by Random House Digital, Inc.. This book was released on 2004 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Oliver Sacks' empathetic understanding and compelling storytelling ability have turned his accounts of his patients and his own life into literature, as evidenced in "Uncle Tungsten," "Stinks and Bangs," and "Cannery Row" from Uncle Tungsten; the Foreword and "Rose R." from "Awakenings"; "A Deaf World" from Seeing Voices; and excerpts from "Island Hopping" and "Pingelap" from The Island of the Colorblind.
Download or read book Uncle Tungsten written by Oliver W. Sacks and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Nevada written by Imogen Binnie and published by MCD x FSG Originals. This book was released on 2022-06-07 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of Vogue's Best Books of 2022 So Far, Buzzfeed's Summer Books You Won’t Be Able To Put Down, Book Riot's Best Summer Reads for 2022, and Dazed's Queer Books to Read in 2022 "[Nevada] is defiant, terse, not quite cynical, sometimes flip, addressed to people who think they know. It is, if you like, punk rock." —The New Yorker "Nevada is a book that changed my life: it shaped both my worldview and personhood, making me the writer I am. And it did so by the oldest of methods, by telling a wise, hilarious, and gripping story." —Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby A beloved and blistering cult classic and finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction finally back in print, Nevada follows a disaffected trans woman as she embarks on a cross-country road trip. Maria Griffiths is almost thirty and works at a used bookstore in New York City while trying to stay true to her punk values. She’s in love with her bike but not with her girlfriend, Steph. She takes random pills and drinks more than is good for her, but doesn’t inject anything except, when she remembers, estrogen, because she’s trans. Everything is mostly fine until Maria and Steph break up, sending Maria into a tailspin, and then onto a cross-country trek in the car she steals from Steph. She ends up in the backwater town of Star City, Nevada, where she meets James, who is probably but not certainly trans, and who reminds Maria of her younger self. As Maria finds herself in the awkward position of trans role model, she realizes that she could become James’s savior—or his downfall. One of the most beloved cult novels of our time and a landmark of trans literature, Imogen Binnie’s Nevada is a blistering, heartfelt, and evergreen coming-of-age story, and a punk-smeared excavation of marginalized life under capitalism. Guided by an instantly memorable, terminally self-aware protagonist—and back in print featuring a new afterword by the author—Nevada is the great American road novel flipped on its head for a new generation.
Download or read book And How Are You Dr Sacks written by Lawrence Weschler and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2019-08-13 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The untold story of Dr. Oliver Sacks, his own most singular patient "[An] engrossing biographical memoir. This is Sacks at full blast: on endless ward rounds, observing his post-encephalitic patients . . . exulting over horseshoe crabs and chunks of Iceland spar." —Barbara Kiser, Nature The author Lawrence Weschler began spending time with Oliver Sacks in the early 1980s, when he set out to profile the neurologist for his own new employer, The New Yorker. Almost a decade earlier, Dr. Sacks had published his masterpiece Awakenings—the account of his long-dormant patients’ miraculous but troubling return to life in a Bronx hospital ward. But the book had hardly been an immediate success, and the rumpled clinician was still largely unknown. Over the ensuing four years, the two men worked closely together until, for wracking personal reasons, Sacks asked Weschler to abandon the profile, a request to which Weschler acceded. The two remained close friends, however, across the next thirty years and then, just as Sacks was dying, he urged Weschler to take up the project once again. This book is the result of that entreaty. Weschler sets Sacks’s brilliant table talk and extravagant personality in vivid relief, casting himself as a beanpole Sancho to Sacks’s capacious Quixote. We see Sacks rowing and ranting and caring deeply; composing the essays that would form The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat; recalling his turbulent drug-fueled younger days; helping his patients and exhausting his friends; and waging intellectual war against a medical and scientific establishment that failed to address his greatest concern: the spontaneous specificity of the individual human soul. And all the while he is pouring out a stream of glorious, ribald, hilarious, and often profound conversation that establishes him as one of the great talkers of the age. Here is the definitive portrait of Sacks as our preeminent romantic scientist, a self-described “clinical ontologist” whose entire practice revolved around the single fundamental question he effectively asked each of his patients: How are you? Which is to say, How do you be? A question which Weschler, with this book, turns back on the good doctor himself.
Download or read book Promiscuities written by Naomi Wolf and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 1998 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Promiscuities, Naomi Wolf has written an exceptionally frank sexual memoir of an individual and a generation, and a call to women not only to reclaim but to celebrate their own sexual experiences, desires and histories.
