On the Move: A Life

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A “wonderful memoir” (Los Angeles Times) about a brilliantly unconventional physician and writer, a man who has illuminated the many ways that the brain makes us human. • “Intimate.... Brim[s] with life and affection.” —The New York Times

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 has 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.

OLIVER SACKS was the author of twelve previous books, including The Mind’s Eye, Musicophilia, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and Awakenings (which inspired both the Oscar-nominated film and a play by Harold Pinter). The New York Times referred to Dr. Sacks as “the poet laureate of medicine,” and he was a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. He lived in New York City, where he was a professor of neurology at the NYU School of Medicine. He died in 2015.