An Oliver Sacks Gift Selection
From Letters to Gratitude, and from Awakenings to The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, here’s a selection of Oliver Sacks books that might make good gifts for people on your list this year.
Letters
The letters of one of the greatest observers of the human species, revealing his passion for life and work, friendship and art, medicine and society, and the richness of his relationships with friends, family, and fellow intellectuals over the decades, collected here for the first time.
“Oliver Sacks’s Letters isn’t a book of the year – it’s a book for a lifetime. The great neurologist’s brilliance and humanity is no secret; but here (superbly edited by Kate Edgar) the reader sees his life unfold in real time: his original, challenging work, his love for his family, his unique passions, his evolving relationship to his sexuality.” —Erica Wagner, The New Statesman
Gratitude
Reflections on what it means to live a good and worthwhile life. These four essays–which went viral when first published in the New York Times–form an ode to the uniqueness of each human being. Now updated with a gorgeous new cover.
My predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved. I have been given much and I have given something in return. Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.” —Oliver Sacks
Awakenings
The classic account of survivors of the encephalitic lethargica and their return to the world after decades of “sleep.” This book was the inspiration for the 1990 film starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams.
“Awakenings came from the most intense medical and human involvement I have even know, as I encountered, lived with, these patients in a Bronx hospital, some of whom had been transfixed, motionless, in a sort of trance, for decades. Migraine was still in the medical canon, but here I took off in all directions–with allegory, philosophy, poetry, you name it.” — Oliver Sacks
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
Shortly before he died, Dr. Sacks wrote an essay looking back on his seminal 1985 book. It appeared for the first time as the preface to this paperback edition, published in 2021.
“Short narratives, essays, parables about patients with a great range of neurological and neuropsychiatric conditions, written in a lighter, more informal style than I had ever used before. To my intense surprise (my publisher’s too!) this book hit some nerve in the reading public, and became an instant best-seller.” — Oliver Sacks
