Tag Archives: Oliver Sacks

Recent Articles of Interest

13 Wednesday Feb 2019

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Here are links to a few articles that I’ve seen recently that I found of interest and suspect various readers of MillersTime might enjoy also.

You’re Using Your iPhone Wrong, by Cal Newport, NYT, 1/27/19 – wherein columnist writes that Steve Jobs never wanted smartphones to be our constant companions.

‘In the Feb. 11, 2019 issue of The New Yorker, there is an Oliver Sacks’ piece that he must have written shortly before his death as I have not seen it anywhere else: The Machine Stops, wherein he writes, among other things, about smart phones and fearing the future. I can’t link to it, but see if you can find it. I liked it (but then I like everything he has written).

The Secrets of Lyndon Johnson’s Archives: On a Presidential Paper Trail by Robert Caro, New Yorker, 1/28/19. Caro takes some time out while working on his final LBJ book to give some insights into how he works. Caro is a national treasure imho.

Two Book Reviews of In My Mind’s Eye: A Thought Diary by Jan Morris – wherein she writes about being 91 and looks back on her earlier years:

In My Mind’s Eye, reviewed by Kate Kelleway, The Guardian, 9/9/18

In My Mind’s Eye, reviewed by Alexander McCall Smith, NYTimes, 1/24/19

And a couple from last year that struck me:

My Father’s Body, At Rest and in Motion by Siddhartha Mukherjee, New Yorker, 1/8/18. An author, doctor and son writes about his dealings and thoughts about end of life issues relating to his father.

The White Darkness: A Solitary Journey Across Antarctica by David Grann, New Yorker, Feb. 12 & 19, 2018. Another favorite writer of mine, this engaging story is now out in book form, but you can read it here.

Plus, one TED talk about how changing her reading focus opened up the world to her, a suggestion by a MillersTime reader Tiffany Lopez.:

My Year Reading a Book from Every Country in the World (https://www.ted.com/talks/ann_morgan_my_year_reading_a_book_from_every_country_in_the_world?language=en by Ann Morgan.

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My First Read Every Sunday Morning

04 Saturday Mar 2017

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I’m not sure exactly how to describe this wonderful Sunday morning gift to those who subscribe (free) to Brain Pickings.

It’s the first email I open and read each Sunday morning. Those years of spending an hour or two with the mammoth Sunday NY Times are long past, and I’m not sure anything has ever filled that void. (Some friends look forward to the Sunday news shows on TV, but I’ve long been in agreement with Calvin Trillin who snarkly refers to them as ‘the Sunday morning gasbags.” Plus, TV has never been central in our lives.)

Anyway, for those of you who don’t know of Brain Pickings, take a look. It’s author, Maria Popova, writes below about what she’s trying to do. But I never saw her once-a-week postings in the exact light she describes. Mostly, she focuses on one or two authors each week and highlights something from his/her writings that she finds particularly insightful and important.

About Brain Pickings, she says:

Hey there. My name is Maria Popova and I’m a reader, writer, interestingness hunter-gatherer, and curious mind at large. I’ve previously written for Wired UK, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab, among others, and am an MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow.

Brain Pickings is my one-woman labor of love — a subjective lens on what matters in the world and why. Mostly, it’s a record of my own becoming as a person — intellectually, creatively, spiritually — and an inquiry into how to live and what it means to lead a good life.

Founded in 2006 as a weekly email that went out to seven friends and eventually brought online, the site was included in the Library of Congress permanent web archive in 2012.

Here is a little bit about my most important learnings from the journey so far.

The core ethos behind Brain Pickings is that creativity is a combinatorial force: it’s our ability to tap into our mental pool of resources — knowledge, insight, information, inspiration, and all the fragments populating our minds — that we’ve accumulated over the years just by being present and alive and awake to the world, and to combine them in extraordinary new ways. In order for us to truly create and contribute to the world, we have to be able to connect countless dots, to cross-pollinate ideas from a wealth of disciplines, to combine and recombine these pieces and build new ideas.

I think of it as LEGOs — if the bricks we have are of only one shape, size, and color, we can build things, but there’s a limit to how imaginative and interesting they will be. The richer and more diverse that pool of resources, that mental library of building blocks, the more visionary and compelling our combinatorial ideas can be.

Brain Pickings — which remains ad-free and supported by readers — is a cross-disciplinary LEGO treasure chest, full of pieces spanning art, science, psychology, design, philosophy, history, politics, anthropology, and more; pieces that enrich our mental pool of resources and empower combinatorial ideas that are stronger, smarter, richer, deeper and more impactful. Above all, it’s about how these different disciplines illuminate one another to glean some insight, directly or indirectly, into that grand question of how to live, and how to live well.

If you are looking to replace some of the time you may be currently spending on obsessive reading of political ‘news,’ check out one or two of the links I’ve posted below that will give you a sense of what her Sunday posts contain.

You can subscribe to her blog (see the details on the left hand side of this or any of her posts), and each Sunday morning you will be greeted by her latest focus. I don’t read them all, but I do find many of them lead me to authors and writings that I enjoy.

Check out one or two of these:

  1. Timeless Advice on Writing: The Collected Wisdom of Great Writers.

2. Ten Learnings from 10 Years of Brain Pickings (includes, towards the second half of this particular post, ten of the things (she) most loved reading and writing about in this first decade of Brain Pickings)

3. A Rap on Race: Margaret Mead and James Baldwin’s Rare Conversation on the Difference Between Guilt and Responsibility.

4. Insomniac City: Bill Hayes’s Extraordinary Love Letter to New York, Oliver Sacks, and Love Itself (Note: Popova is quite a fan of Oliver Sacks and has written about him and his various writings on numerous occasions. This one is her latest).

5. Wendell Berry on How to Be a Poet and a Complete Human Being.

 

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If You Love Oliver Sacks, Read “Insomniac City”

23 Thursday Feb 2017

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If you are an Oliver Sacks’ fan (how could you not be?), you’ll be delighted with this new book.

It is a memoir and diary by the man Sacks came to love at the age of 75 and the man with whom he shared the last years of his life. Don’t be concerned that it might be an invasion of privacy. It is done in such a lovely manner that you can’t help but smile at the parts that involve ‘O’ (as Bill Hayes often refers to Sacks). It is the Sacks that you’ve come to know and love.

You will recognize the man and some of the reasons you’ve been so taken by him. It is the same man who revealed sides of himself never previously known in his wonderful memoir On the Move: A Life and in the articles following that publication in which he wrote about facing death.

One of the engaging qualities of both Hayes’ book and its window into many private moments with Sacks is that the character described (Sacks) is the one you know. You will get additional insights into him and into who he was and how happy he was in the final years of his life, including in his death.

Insomniac City is also about more than Oliver Sacks and Bill Hayes’ relationship with him, though that by itself is worth the short read (290 pages).

It’s also about someone you most likely don’t know, Bill Hayes, who is someone I came to admire and was glad to begin to know, not only for the joy and happiness he gave to Sacks but for the person Hayes is.

Mixed in to times Hayes spends with Sacks are Hayes’ descriptions of New York City and how and why he came to love it when he moved there in 2009 at the age of 48. If you know NYC, much will resonate, I suspect. If you don’t know it or if you don’t particularly like it, Hayes may give you a new or different perspective.

Much of the book is about Hayes’ own interactions with the city, with individuals that are not usually associated with the city, though many are the heart and soul, I think, of New York. Hayes is a writer (The Anatomist, Fire Quarts, and Sleep Demons) and a contributor to the New York Times, the New York Review of Book, and Salon. He is also a photographer whose photos have appeared in the NY Times, Vanity Fair, and the New Yorker. And throughout the book he takes you with his camera as he records ordinary people throughout the city (some of those photos are in Insomniac City).

There is a good deal of wisdom in the book, particularly about issues of grief and enjoyment of life.

Hayes has a good eye for seeing, a good hand for writing, and a good nature for loving.

Check it out.

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PS – Oliver Sacks

31 Monday Aug 2015

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From The Oliver Sacks Newsletter/Foundation, Sunday morning, Aug. 30, 2015:

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Oliver Sacks, London, May 2015   Photo by Bill Hayes

Oliver Sacks died early this morning at his home in Greenwich Village, surrounded by his close friends and family. He was 82. He spent his final days doing what he loved—playing the piano, writing to friends, swimming, enjoying smoked salmon, and completing several articles. His final thoughts were of gratitude for a life well lived and the privilege of working with his patients at various hospitals and residences including the Little Sisters of the Poor in the Bronx and in Queens, New York.

Dr. Sacks was writing to the last. On August 14, he published an essay, “Sabbath,” in the New York Times. Two more articles are to be published this week, one in the New York Review of Books and one in the New Yorker.

Oliver Sacks at work, February 2015

Oliver Sacks at work, February 2015 – Photo by Bill Hayes

Sacks also left several nearly completed books and a vast archive of correspondence, manuscripts, and journals. Before his death Sacks established the Oliver Sacks Foundation, a nonprofit organization devoted to increasing understanding of the human brain and mind through the power of narrative nonfiction and case histories.

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On the Move: A Life

20 Wednesday May 2015

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If you ‘know of’ Oliver Sacks, have read one or more of his 12 previous books, then the picture above might be a bit surprising to you.

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Usually, the pictures we see of this neurologist/author portray quite a different image.

More like this picture to your right:sacks_scourfield-300x298

As you may know, Sacks is a prolific writer, using cases from his work with a variety of patients to describe a world that most of us do not know, a world where anomalies of the brain lead to behaviors and lives that often seem strange, at least until Sacks explains them to us.

As you also may know, Oliver Sacks is dying of terminal cancer, as he announced in an eloquent and affecting NYTimes column, My Own Life, three months ago (although since writing that piece in February, he wrote a second column in April, A General Feeling of Disorder, NY Review of Books, and seems to have ‘rallied’ and may be with us for a while longer).

I have long been intrigued by Sacks’ work, his writings, his findings, and by the man himself. Thus, when his 13th book, a memoir, On the Move: A Life, was published several weeks ago, I, of course, read it immediately.

Some of what we read in this memoir is familiar as he has written about himself previously (particularly in his Uncle Tugsten and in his A Leg to Stand On). We know he is a doctor, a scientist, an author, and above all an advocate for (our) understanding strange behaviors and listening to the lives of (his) patients.

But there is much that is new also.

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Join Us to Hear Oliver Sacks and Kay Redfield Jamison

18 Tuesday Jun 2013

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Two of my favorite authors in one place, talking to each other!

sacksPhysician, neurologist, Professor of Neurology at NYU’s School of Medicine and popular author Oliver Sacks will be at DC’s Sixth and I St. Synagogue on Wednesday, July 17th at 7 PM to talk about his book Hallucinations.

Published in 2012 and soon to be released in paperback (July 2, 2013) and large print (July 6, 2013), Hallucinations draws on Sack’s “own experiences, a wealth of clinical cases from among his patients, and famous historical examples ranging from Dostoevsky to Lewis Carroll…(and) investigates the mystery of these sensory deceptions: what they say about the working of our brains, how they have influenced our folklore and culture, and why the potential for hallucination is present in us all.”

Kay.418490_342557112453890_506767284_nClinical psychologist, expert on bipolar disorder, Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and author* Kay Redfield Jamison will interview, or ‘converse’, with Sacks about his latest book and his views about this aspect of the brain and the wide ranging ways in which hallucinations are “part of the human experience.”

The interview/conversation will no doubt (hopefully?) include a discussion of Sack’s views that near death experiences, out of body experiences, etc. are related to how the brain works and are not what author Eban Alexander (The Proof of Heaven) writes and believes are in fact out of body experiences and ‘prove’ there are such things as journeys into the afterlife.

Jamison has said she has had a near-death experience and has said, “Mental illness can trigger religious revelations and visions — even out-of-body and near-death experiences”.

Ellen and I are going to Sixth & I on July 17th and have two additional tickets for two of you to join us. Let me know by email (Samesty84@gmail.com) if you are interested.

 

(*Jamison, who in addition to her more well known books, An Unquiet Mind, Manic Depressive Illness, Night Falls Fast, Exuberance, and Touched with Fire, has written what for me is one of the best memoirs I’ve read in many years, Nothing Was the Same, which, if you don’t know of it, bears checking out.)

(Also, see this earlier post on MillersTime, Life After Death? A Current Controversy where in Sacks and Alexander discuss their views on this topic and friend David P. Stang writes with great passion that Sacks doesn’t know what he’s talking about.)

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