On the Move by Oliver Sacks

I had yearned for a house of my own, such as I had rented in Topanga Canyon back in my UCLA days.  And I wanted a house by the water so I could put on swim trunks and sandals and walk straight down to the sea.  So the little red clapboard house on Horton Street, half a block from the beach, was ideal.

--Oliver Sacks, On the Move: A Life (Knopf, 2015)

Sacks's autobiography is both annoying and charming, as autobiographies tend to be.  He is rather full of himself, always lived alone, had no sex for thirty-five years (apparently from 1973, when he was forty, to 2008) and was slow to come to terms with his own homosexuality.  Meanwhile, he published a number of books that effectively combined populism with technical neurology, investigating again and again how the mind works and helping all those he could, while at the same time suffering from shyness and an inability to recognize faces.

Sacks (1933-2015) was a solitary person who nonetheless worked closely with a number of good editors, especially Robert Silvers of The New York Review of Books, where many of his best essays appeared.  At various points in his life Sacks took lots of drugs, including LSD, which he felt helped him to understand the mind and how to use drugs to help his patients, especially the use of L-dopa to open up the imprisoned minds of of those for whom consciousness had been suspended for many years, something he explored in the book Awakenings, published in 1973.

Sacks was always intellectually curious, which helped overcome his shyness and his risk-taking adventures on motorcycles and hiking.  But what especially comes through in this autobiography is his compassion for his patients and his relentless attempts to understand what is going on in their minds.