Everything in Its Place gives us an intimate portrait of a master writer and thinker at work. In counterpoint to these elegant investigations of what makes us human, this volume also includes pieces that celebrate Sacks's love of the natural world – and his last meditations on life in the twenty-first century.

In several of the compassionate case histories collected here, Sacks considers for the first time the enigmas of depression, psychosis, and schizophrenia, and in others he returns to conditions that have long fascinated him: Tourette's syndrome, ageing, dementia, and hallucinations. Everything in Its Place is a celebration of Sacks's myriad interests, all told with his characteristic compassion, erudition, and luminous prose. Why do humans need gardens? How, and when, does a physician tell his patient she has Alzheimer's? What is social media doing to our brains? Oliver Sacks, renowned scientist and storyteller, is adored by readers for his neurological case histories, his fascination and familiarity with human behaviour at its most unexpected and unfamiliar. In this spirited volume, Oliver Sacks examines the many passions of his own life – both as a doctor engaged with the central questions of human existence, and as a polymath conversant in all the sciences. (Apr.From the bestselling author of On Gratitude and On the Move. Piercingly insightful and delightfully strange, Sacks’s final collection is a treat for the chronically curious. Sacks’s gentle, ruminative voice is a salve when investigating difficult subject matter, but there are plenty of lighter moments as well, as in a brief discussion of a topic dear to his heart-New York City’s many and varied streetlamps. Sacks also recalls being consulted in the case of actor/writer Spalding Gray, who became desperately, compulsively depressed after a brain injury in 2001 and died by suicide three years later. Readers will learn of influences that molded Sacks’s brilliant mind, from the cephalopod specimens at the Natural History Museum in London to the “visionary, mystical” 19th-century scientist Humphry Davy, whom Sacks dubs the “Poet of Chemistry.” Of the many remarkable essays on medical conditions, “Travels with Lowell” stands out for its sensitivity and nuance, as Sacks travels the world alongside a photographer with Tourette’s, interviewing others with the condition, including one man who could trace incidents of the syndrome back six generations in his family, yet was not officially diagnosed until age 38. In this lovely collection of previously unpublished essays, the late, celebrated author and neurologist Sacks ( The River of Consciousness) muses on his career, his youth, the mental health field, and much more.

Everything in its place oliver sacks