Ten years after his death, a substantial, read band of Oliver Sacks, the master of medical case stories and perhaps the most famous neurologist in the world has been published.
When named Oliver Sacks, a funny book title come up with: “The man who confused his wife with a hat” or “The day on which my leg went away”. Or you remember Robin Williams, who played him in the Hollywood film “Awakenings – Zeit of Awakens”.
If you miss sacks, this book now has an “awakening” experience of a special kind. On 1,000 pages we experience it again up close with all strengths and weaknesses. Lively, clever, desperate, euphoric, pathetic, almost manic and digestive, but always interesting. Whether he writes to his parents, to patients, to Nobel Prize winners such as Francis Crick, whether on Susan Sontag, Jane Goodall, a 12-year-old girl who wants to interview him or to beloved men: We encounter an idiosyncratic mix of doctor, scientist and writer, yes poet. And not to forget the biologist, who he was, and which the love of nature (fern!) And Charles Darwin carries through life.
Most of the sack did excessive – also swimming, weight lifting or drugs. It is therefore not surprising that some letters have dozens of pages that a thought becomes an essay and he adds at the end of a letter that even the colored ligament of the typewriter is now gray and tired.
The most interesting are those pages on which he defends himself against the accusation that he is a storyteller. He fought a fight against the cold, impersonal research, especially in medicine for his life. The human perspective and the individual patient were important to him. Above all, he wanted to be understood.
His letter archive-written in a doubt-hacking system or in a lousy manuscript, with crossings and underlines, with marginal notes and many punctuation marks-especially the euphoric nature. Ilona Jerger
Oliver Sacks
Letters. Edited by Kate Edgar
Rowohlt Verlag, 1,008 pages, € 48, –
ISBN 978-3-498-00174-2