Shelf Awareness
Internationally renowned neurologist and author Oliver Sacks, "who explored some of the brain's strangest pathways in bestselling case histories like The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, using his patients' disorders as starting points for eloquent meditations on consciousness and the human condition," died yesterday, the New York Times reported. He was 82. Sacks had announced last February in an Op-Ed essay that he was in the late stages of terminal cancer, and continued to chronicle his final months, including a compelling piece in the July 24 edition of the Times headlined "My Periodic Table."
As a medical doctor and writer, Sacks "achieved a level of popular renown rare among scientists," the Times noted. His many books include Awakenings, An Anthropologist on Mars, The Mind's Eye, The Island of the Colorblind, Musicophilia, Seeing Voices and his recent memoir, On the Move: A Life.
In a retrospective appraisal, Times book critic Michiko Kakutani wrote: "It's no coincidence that so many of the qualities that made Oliver Sacks such a brilliant writer are the same qualities that made him an ideal doctor: keen powers of observation and a devotion to detail, deep reservoirs of sympathy, and an intuitive understanding of the fathomless mysteries of the human brain and the intricate connections between the body and the mind."
When he revealed his disease last winter, Sacks observed: "I cannot pretend I am without fear. But 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; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.
"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."
---
Wayne Dyer, who "turned his 1976 bestseller Your Erroneous Zones into a self-help empire," died on Saturday, the Wrap reported. He was 75.
Dyer wrote more than 30 books, including The Power of Intention and Stop the Excuses! How to Change Lifelong Thoughts. His philosophy was that positive, happy thoughts lead to a positive, happy life.
A psychotherapist and former professor at St. John's University in New York City, Dyer was a friend of Oprah Winfrey and Ellen DeGeneres and appeared frequently on their shows.
While over at Brain Pickings:
The
Silent Music of the Mind: Remembering Oliver Sacks
I was a relative latecomer to the
work of Oliver Sacks
(July 9, 1933–August 30, 2015), that great enchanter of storytelling who spent
his life bridging science and the human spirit – partly because I was not yet
born when he first bewitched the reading public with his writing, and partly
because those early books never made it past the Iron Curtain and into the
Bulgaria of my childhood. It was only in my twenties, having made my way to
America, that I fell in love with Dr. Sacks’s writing and the mind from which
it sprang – a mind absolutely magnificent, buoyed by a full heart and a radiant
spirit.
As a medical doctor and writer, Sacks "achieved a level of popular renown rare among scientists," the Times noted. His many books include Awakenings, An Anthropologist on Mars, The Mind's Eye, The Island of the Colorblind, Musicophilia, Seeing Voices and his recent memoir, On the Move: A Life.
In a retrospective appraisal, Times book critic Michiko Kakutani wrote: "It's no coincidence that so many of the qualities that made Oliver Sacks such a brilliant writer are the same qualities that made him an ideal doctor: keen powers of observation and a devotion to detail, deep reservoirs of sympathy, and an intuitive understanding of the fathomless mysteries of the human brain and the intricate connections between the body and the mind."
When he revealed his disease last winter, Sacks observed: "I cannot pretend I am without fear. But 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; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.
"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."
---
Wayne Dyer, who "turned his 1976 bestseller Your Erroneous Zones into a self-help empire," died on Saturday, the Wrap reported. He was 75.
Dyer wrote more than 30 books, including The Power of Intention and Stop the Excuses! How to Change Lifelong Thoughts. His philosophy was that positive, happy thoughts lead to a positive, happy life.
A psychotherapist and former professor at St. John's University in New York City, Dyer was a friend of Oprah Winfrey and Ellen DeGeneres and appeared frequently on their shows.
While over at Brain Pickings:
The
Silent Music of the Mind: Remembering Oliver Sacks
I was a relative latecomer to the
work of Oliver Sacks
(July 9, 1933–August 30, 2015), that great enchanter of storytelling who spent
his life bridging science and the human spirit – partly because I was not yet
born when he first bewitched the reading public with his writing, and partly
because those early books never made it past the Iron Curtain and into the
Bulgaria of my childhood. It was only in my twenties, having made my way to
America, that I fell in love with Dr. Sacks’s writing and the mind from which
it sprang – a mind absolutely magnificent, buoyed by a full heart and a radiant
spirit.
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