Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:
A deeply moving testimony and celebration of how to embrace life. No writer has succeeded in capturing the medical and human drama of illness as honestly and as eloquently as Oliver Sacks. During the last few months of his life, he wrote a set of essays in which he movingly explored his feelings about completing a life and coming to terms with his own death.
"A series of heart-rending yet ultimately uplifting essays....A lasting gift to readers." -- The Washington Post
"It is the fate of every human being," Sacks writes, "to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death." Together, these four essays form an ode to the uniqueness of each human being and to gratitude for the gift of life.
"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
"Oliver Sacks was like no other clinician, or writer. He was drawn to the homes of the sick, the institutions of the most frail and disabled, the company of the unusual and the 'abnormal.' He wanted to see humanity in its many variants and to do so in his own, almost anachronistic way--face to face, over time, away from our burgeoning apparatus of computers and algorithms. And, through his writing, he showed us what he saw."
--Atul Gawande, author of Being Mortal
"In July 2013, Oliver Sacks turned eighty and wrote [a] ... piece in The New York Times about the prospect of old age and the freedom he envisioned for himself in binding together the thoughts and feelings of a lifetime. Eighteen months later, he was given a diagnosis of terminal cancer--which he announced publicly in another piece in The New York Times. Gratitude is Sacks's meditation on why life [continued] to enthrall him even as he [faced] the all-too-close presence of his own death, and how to live out the months that [remained] in the richest and deepest way possible"-- Provided by publisher.
Reviews provided by Syndetics
Library Journal Review
Sacks's (Awakenings; The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat) powerful look back at his remarkable life was published posthumously. The book chronicles the famous author's thoughts, wishes, regrets, and, above all, feelings of love, happiness, and gratitude even as he faced the cancer that ended his life last year at 82. In essays that originally appeared in print in the New York Times, Sacks relates what makes him happy-simply to be alive on a beautiful day, for example-as well as what causes him sadness as he ages. He considers people he has known and loved and how they approached death and candidly discusses his feelings upon learning that his cancer had metastasized and was terminal. Surprisingly, the writings feature themes related to physics rather than biology, with Sacks explaining that "Times of stress.have led me to turn, or to return, to the physical sciences, a world where there is no life, but also no death." While the book shows no dimming of intellect-indeed, the material offers incisive, poignant observations-the author's usual scientific narrative has in places been supplanted by wistful musings on life and love. The essays also tie up the strands of a career spent investigating and writing, mentioning various projects, mentors, and books along the way. VERDICT A perfect gift for thoughtful readers, and a title that belongs in science and biography collections.-Henrietta Verma, formerly with Library Journal © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Book Review
Valediction from the late neurologist and writer Sacks (On the Move: A Life, 2015, etc.). In this set of four short essays, much-forwarded opinion pieces from the New York Times, the author ponders illness, specifically the metastatic cancer that spread from eye to liver and in doing so foreclosed any possibility of treatment. His brief reflections on that unfortunate development give way to, yes, gratitude as he examines the good things that he has experienced over what, in the end, turned out to be a rather long life after all, lasting 82 years. To be sure, Sacks has regrets about leaving the world, not least of them not being around to see "a thousandbreakthroughs in the physical and biological sciences," as well as the night sky sprinkled with stars and the yellow legal pads on which he worked sprinkled with words. Sacks works a few familiar tropes and elaborates others. Charmingly, he reflects on his habit since childhood of associating each year of his life with the element of corresponding atomic weight on the periodic table; given polonium's "intense, murderous radioactivity," then perhaps 84 isn't all that it's cut out to be. There are some glaring repetitions here, unfortunate given the intense brevity of this book, such as his twice citing Nathaniel Hawthorne's call to revel in "intercourse with the world"no, not that kind. Yet his thoughts overallwhile not as soul-stirringly inspirational as the similar reflections of Randy Pausch or as bent on chasing down the story as Christopher Hitchens' last bookare shaped into an austere beauty, as when Sacks writes of being able in his final moments to "see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts." If that promise of clarity is what awaits us all, then death doesn't seem so awful, and that is a great gift from Sacks. A fitting, lovely farewell. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
TextPublication details: New York : Alfred A. Knopf ; Toronto : Alfred A. Knopf of Canada, 2015.Edition: First editionDescription: xi, 45 pages : illustrations, portraits ; 18 cmISBN: