A Leg to Stand On
Page 22
I should perhaps add, for bibliographic purposes, that I wrote about my “leg” experience three times before the publication of A Leg to Stand On: at some length in “The Leg” (London Review of Books, 17–30 June, 1982: pp. 3–5); very briefly in “The Nature of Consciousness” (Harper’s Magazine, December 1975); and in “The Bull on the Mountain,” (New York Review of Books, 28 June, 1984). More recently I have discussed body-image in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, especially in “The Disembodied Lady,” “Hands,” “Phantoms,” “Eyes Right” and, of course, “The Man Who Fell Out of Bed”; and in an article, “Neurology and the Soul,” which appeared in the 22 November, 1990 New York Review of Books, and most recently in “Making Up the Mind,” New York Review of Books, 8 April, 1993.
ALSO BY
OLIVER SACKS
EVERYTHING IN ITS PLACE
First Loves and Last Tales
Everything in Its Place is a final volume of essays that showcases Oliver Sacks’s broad range of interests—from his passion for ferns, swimming, and horsetails to his final case histories exploring schizophrenia, dementia, and Alzheimer’s. Sacks, scientist and storyteller, is beloved by readers for his neurological case histories and his fascination and familiarity with human behavior at its most unexpected and unfamiliar. Everything in Its Place is a celebration of Sacks’s myriad interests, told with his characteristic compassion and erudition, and in his luminous prose.
Science
THE RIVER OF CONSCIOUSNESS
In the pieces that compose The River of Consciousness (many first published in The New York Review of Books, among other places), 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.
Science
ON THE MOVE
A Life
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 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. On the Move is the story of a brilliantly unconventional physician and writer, a man who has illuminated the many ways that the brain makes us human.
Biography
ALSO AVAILABLE
An Anthropologist on Mars
Awakenings
Hallucinations
The Island of the Colorblind
Migraine
The Mind’s Eye
Musicophilia
Oaxaca Journal
Seeing Voices
Uncle Tungsten
VINTAGE BOOKS
Available wherever books are sold.
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