
Awakenings
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Narrated by:
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Jonathan Davis
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Oliver Sacks
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By:
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Oliver Sacks
About this listen
Awakenings - which inspired the major motion picture - is the remarkable story of a group of patients who contracted sleeping sickness during the great epidemic just after World War I. Frozen for decades in a trance-like state, these men and women were given up as hopeless until 1969, when Dr. Oliver Sacks gave them the then-new drug L-DOPA, which had an astonishing, explosive, "awakening" effect. Dr. Sacks recounts the moving case histories of his patients, their lives, and the extraordinary transformations which went with their reintroduction to a changed world.
PLEASE NOTE: Some changes have been made to the original manuscript with the permission of Oliver Sacks.
©1973, 1976, 1982, 1983, 1987, 1990 Oliver Sacks (P)2011 Audible, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Oliver Sacks' The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat tells the stories of individuals afflicted with fantastic perceptual and intellectual aberrations: patients who have lost their memories and with them the greater part of their pasts; who are no longer able to recognize people and common objects; who are stricken with violent tics and grimaces or who shout involuntary obscenities; whose limbs have become alien; who have been dismissed as retarded yet are gifted with uncanny artistic or mathematical talents.
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In Seeing Voices, Oliver Sacks turns his attention to the subject of deafness, and the result is a deeply felt portrait of a minority struggling for recognition and respect - a minority with its own rich, sometimes astonishing, culture and unique visual language, an extraordinary mode of communication that tells us much about the basis of language in hearing people as well.
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-
-
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-
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-
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-
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-
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-
-
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- By Rlelli07 on 10-26-10
By: Oliver Sacks
-
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- By: Oliver Sacks
- Narrated by: Dan Woren
- Length: 36 mins
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-
Overall
-
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-
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A deeply moving testimony and celebration of how to embrace life. No writer has succeeded in capturing the medical and human drama of illness as honestly and as eloquently as Oliver Sacks. During the last few months of his life, he wrote a set of essays in which he movingly explored his feelings about completing a life and coming to terms with his own death.
-
-
To the Point, Yet Told From the Heart
- By LJT on 01-18-16
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-
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- By: Oliver Sacks
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis, Oliver Sacks - introduction
- Length: 9 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Oliver Sacks' The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat tells the stories of individuals afflicted with fantastic perceptual and intellectual aberrations: patients who have lost their memories and with them the greater part of their pasts; who are no longer able to recognize people and common objects; who are stricken with violent tics and grimaces or who shout involuntary obscenities; whose limbs have become alien; who have been dismissed as retarded yet are gifted with uncanny artistic or mathematical talents.
-
-
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-
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- Memories of a Chemical Boyhood
- By: Oliver Sacks
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 10 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Long before Oliver Sacks became a distinguished neurologist and best-selling writer, he was a small English boy fascinated by metals - also by chemical reactions (the louder and smellier the better), photography, squids and cuttlefish, H.G. Wells, and the periodic table. In this endlessly charming and eloquent memoir, the he chronicles his love affair with science and the magnificently odd and sometimes harrowing childhood in which that love affair unfolded.
-
-
FOR COMMITED LOVERS OF OLIVER SACKS WORK
- By Jeff on 05-02-12
By: Oliver Sacks
-
Seeing Voices
- A Journey Into the World of the Deaf
- By: Oliver Sacks
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis, Oliver Sacks - introduction
- Length: 5 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Seeing Voices, Oliver Sacks turns his attention to the subject of deafness, and the result is a deeply felt portrait of a minority struggling for recognition and respect - a minority with its own rich, sometimes astonishing, culture and unique visual language, an extraordinary mode of communication that tells us much about the basis of language in hearing people as well.
-
-
A Rich Experience
- By Douglas on 11-27-12
By: Oliver Sacks
-
Musicophilia
- Tales of Music and the Brain
- By: Oliver Sacks
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 11 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
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-
Story
Music can move us to the heights or depths of emotion. It can persuade us to buy something, or remind us of our first date. It can lift us out of depression when nothing else can. It can get us dancing to its beat. But the power of music goes much, much further. Indeed, music occupies more areas of our brain than language does - humans are a musical species.
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Hallucinations don’t belong wholly to the insane. Much more commonly, they are linked to sensory deprivation, intoxication, illness, or injury. Here Dr. Sacks weaves together stories of his patients and of his own mind-altering experiences to illuminate what hallucinations tell us about the organization and structure of our brains, how they have influenced every culture’s folklore and art, and why the potential for hallucination is present in us all.
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Dr. Oliver Sacks argues the migraine cannot be understood simply as an illness, but must be viewed as a complex condition with a unique role to play in each individual's life.
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Performance
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Story
From the best-selling author of Gratitude and On the Move, a final volume of essays that showcase Sacks's broad range of interests - from his passion for ferns, swimming, and horsetails, to his final case histories exploring schizophrenia, dementia, and Alzheimer's.
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- Length: 5 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A collection of essays that displays Oliver Sacks' passionate engagement with the most compelling and seminal ideas of human endeavor: evolution, creativity, memory, time, consciousness, and experience. The River of Consciousness is one of two books Sacks was working on up to his death, and it reveals his ability to make unexpected connections, his sheer joy in knowledge, and his unceasing, timeless project to understand what makes us human.
-
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Oliver Sacks is well known as an explorer of the human mind - a neurologist with a gift for complex, insightful portrayals of people and their conditions. However, he is also a card-carrying member of the American Fern Society, and since childhood has been fascinated by these primitive plants and their ability to survive and adapt in many climates. Oaxaca Journal is Sacks' spellbinding account of his trip with a group of fellow fern enthusiasts to the beautiful, history-steeped province of Oaxaca, Mexico.
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Critic reviews
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-
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-
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-
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-
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-
-
To the Point, Yet Told From the Heart
- By LJT on 01-18-16
By: Oliver Sacks
-
The Mind's Eye
- By: Oliver Sacks
- Narrated by: Oliver Sacks, Richard Davidson
- Length: 8 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
An exploration of vision through the case histories of six individuals - including a renowned pianist who continues to give concerts despite losing the ability to read the score, and a neurobiologist born with crossed eyes who, late in life, suddenly acquires binocular vision, and how her brain adapts to that new skill.
-
-
Same ole Sacks--great yarns as usual.
- By Rlelli07 on 10-26-10
By: Oliver Sacks
-
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- By: Oliver Sacks
- Narrated by: Dan Woren, Kate Edgar
- Length: 5 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A collection of essays that displays Oliver Sacks' passionate engagement with the most compelling and seminal ideas of human endeavor: evolution, creativity, memory, time, consciousness, and experience. The River of Consciousness is one of two books Sacks was working on up to his death, and it reveals his ability to make unexpected connections, his sheer joy in knowledge, and his unceasing, timeless project to understand what makes us human.
-
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-
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-
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-
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-
-
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- By Pamela Harvey on 01-05-13
By: Oliver Sacks
-
An Anthropologist on Mars
- Seven Paradoxical Tales
- By: Oliver Sacks
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis, Oliver Sacks
- Length: 11 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
To these seven narratives of neurological disorder Dr. Sacks brings the same humanity, poetic observation, and infectious sense of wonder that are apparent in his bestsellers Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. These men, women, and one extraordinary child emerge as brilliantly adaptive personalities, whose conditions have not so much debilitated them as ushered them into another reality.
-
-
SACKS IS AN ABSOLUTE JOY !!
- By Jeff on 09-22-13
By: Oliver Sacks
-
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: and Other Clinical Tales
- By: Oliver Sacks
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis, Oliver Sacks - introduction
- Length: 9 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Oliver Sacks' The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat tells the stories of individuals afflicted with fantastic perceptual and intellectual aberrations: patients who have lost their memories and with them the greater part of their pasts; who are no longer able to recognize people and common objects; who are stricken with violent tics and grimaces or who shout involuntary obscenities; whose limbs have become alien; who have been dismissed as retarded yet are gifted with uncanny artistic or mathematical talents.
-
-
I rarely stop reading a book halfway through...
- By Rusty on 09-04-15
By: Oliver Sacks
-
Gratitude
- Essays
- By: Oliver Sacks
- Narrated by: Dan Woren
- Length: 36 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A deeply moving testimony and celebration of how to embrace life. No writer has succeeded in capturing the medical and human drama of illness as honestly and as eloquently as Oliver Sacks. During the last few months of his life, he wrote a set of essays in which he movingly explored his feelings about completing a life and coming to terms with his own death.
-
-
To the Point, Yet Told From the Heart
- By LJT on 01-18-16
By: Oliver Sacks
-
The Mind's Eye
- By: Oliver Sacks
- Narrated by: Oliver Sacks, Richard Davidson
- Length: 8 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
An exploration of vision through the case histories of six individuals - including a renowned pianist who continues to give concerts despite losing the ability to read the score, and a neurobiologist born with crossed eyes who, late in life, suddenly acquires binocular vision, and how her brain adapts to that new skill.
-
-
Same ole Sacks--great yarns as usual.
- By Rlelli07 on 10-26-10
By: Oliver Sacks
-
The River of Consciousness
- By: Oliver Sacks
- Narrated by: Dan Woren, Kate Edgar
- Length: 5 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A collection of essays that displays Oliver Sacks' passionate engagement with the most compelling and seminal ideas of human endeavor: evolution, creativity, memory, time, consciousness, and experience. The River of Consciousness is one of two books Sacks was working on up to his death, and it reveals his ability to make unexpected connections, his sheer joy in knowledge, and his unceasing, timeless project to understand what makes us human.
-
-
Important but Less Interesting
- By Michael on 11-16-17
By: Oliver Sacks
-
Musicophilia
- Tales of Music and the Brain
- By: Oliver Sacks
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 11 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Music can move us to the heights or depths of emotion. It can persuade us to buy something, or remind us of our first date. It can lift us out of depression when nothing else can. It can get us dancing to its beat. But the power of music goes much, much further. Indeed, music occupies more areas of our brain than language does - humans are a musical species.
-
-
The Best Of Sacks...
- By Douglas on 11-23-12
By: Oliver Sacks
-
A Leg to Stand On
- By: Oliver Sacks
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis, Oliver Sacks - introduction
- Length: 7 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Dr. Oliver Sacks's books Awakenings, An Anthropologist on Mars and the best-selling The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat have been acclaimed for their compassion in the treatment of patients affected with profound disorders. In A Leg to Stand On, it is Sacks himself who is the patient: an encounter with a bull on a desolate mountain in Norway has left him with a severely damaged leg. But what should be a routine recuperation is actually the beginning of a strange medical journey.
-
-
Not sure what he was trying for here
- By John S. on 08-17-11
By: Oliver Sacks
-
Uncle Tungsten
- Memories of a Chemical Boyhood
- By: Oliver Sacks
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 10 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Long before Oliver Sacks became a distinguished neurologist and best-selling writer, he was a small English boy fascinated by metals - also by chemical reactions (the louder and smellier the better), photography, squids and cuttlefish, H.G. Wells, and the periodic table. In this endlessly charming and eloquent memoir, the he chronicles his love affair with science and the magnificently odd and sometimes harrowing childhood in which that love affair unfolded.
-
-
FOR COMMITED LOVERS OF OLIVER SACKS WORK
- By Jeff on 05-02-12
By: Oliver Sacks
-
Migraine
- By: Oliver Sacks
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 12 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Dr. Oliver Sacks argues the migraine cannot be understood simply as an illness, but must be viewed as a complex condition with a unique role to play in each individual's life.
-
-
Why is this an audio book?
- By BW724 on 06-25-19
By: Oliver Sacks
-
Everything in Its Place
- First Loves and Last Tales
- By: Oliver Sacks
- Narrated by: Dan Woren
- Length: 8 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From the best-selling author of Gratitude and On the Move, a final volume of essays that showcase Sacks's broad range of interests - from his passion for ferns, swimming, and horsetails, to his final case histories exploring schizophrenia, dementia, and Alzheimer's.
-
-
Missing Sacks
- By Brandy on 12-02-19
By: Oliver Sacks
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Seeing Voices
- A Journey Into the World of the Deaf
- By: Oliver Sacks
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis, Oliver Sacks - introduction
- Length: 5 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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In Seeing Voices, Oliver Sacks turns his attention to the subject of deafness, and the result is a deeply felt portrait of a minority struggling for recognition and respect - a minority with its own rich, sometimes astonishing, culture and unique visual language, an extraordinary mode of communication that tells us much about the basis of language in hearing people as well.
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A Rich Experience
- By Douglas on 11-27-12
By: Oliver Sacks
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Letters
- By: Oliver Sacks, Kate Edgar - editor
- Narrated by: James Langton, Kate Edgar
- Length: 28 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Sensitively introduced and edited by Kate Edgar, Sacks’s longtime editor, the letters deliver a portrait of Sacks as he wrestles with the workings of the brain and mind. We see, through his eyes, the beginnings of modern neuroscience, following the thought processes of one of the great intellectuals of our time, whose words, as evidenced in this book, were unfailingly shaped with generosity and wonder toward other people.
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Beautiful letters by a beautiful mind
- By Adriana D. Briscoe on 01-13-25
By: Oliver Sacks, and others
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Oaxaca Journal
- By: Oliver Sacks
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis, Oliver Sacks - introduction
- Length: 4 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Oliver Sacks is well known as an explorer of the human mind - a neurologist with a gift for complex, insightful portrayals of people and their conditions. However, he is also a card-carrying member of the American Fern Society, and since childhood has been fascinated by these primitive plants and their ability to survive and adapt in many climates. Oaxaca Journal is Sacks' spellbinding account of his trip with a group of fellow fern enthusiasts to the beautiful, history-steeped province of Oaxaca, Mexico.
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A gem
- By Daniela on 06-04-15
By: Oliver Sacks
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My Stroke of Insight
- By: Jill Bolte Taylor
- Narrated by: Jill Bolte Taylor
- Length: 5 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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In My Stroke of Insight, Taylor shares her unique perspective on the brain and its capacity for recovery, and the sense of omniscient understanding she gained from this unusual and inspiring voyage out of the abyss of a wounded brain. It would take eight years for Taylor to heal completely. Because of her knowledge of how the brain works, her respect for the cells composing her human form, and most of all an amazing mother, Taylor completely repaired her mind and recalibrated her understanding of the world.
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Excellent description of stroke experience
- By Polyhymnia on 09-26-09
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The Master and His Emissary
- The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
- By: Iain McGilchrist
- Narrated by: Dennis Kleinman
- Length: 27 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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This pioneering account sets out to understand the structure of the human brain - the place where mind meets matter. Until recently, the left hemisphere of our brain has been seen as the "rational" side, the superior partner to the right. But is this distinction true? Drawing on a vast body of experimental research, Iain McGilchrist argues while our left brain makes for a wonderful servant, it is a very poor master.
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The Master and His Emissary
- By Michael on 11-07-20
By: Iain McGilchrist
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I Heard There Was a Secret Chord
- Music as Medicine
- By: Daniel J. Levitin
- Narrated by: Daniel J. Levitin
- Length: 12 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Music is one of humanity’s oldest medicines. From the Far East to the Ottoman Empire, Europe to Africa and the pre-colonial Americas, many cultures have developed their own rich traditions for using sound and rhythm to ease suffering, promote healing, and calm the mind. In his latest work, neuroscientist and New York Times best-selling author Daniel J. Levitin (This Is Your Brain on Music) explores the curative powers of music, showing us how and why it is one of the most potent therapies today.
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Various health issues impacted by music.
- By Anne F. Oneill on 09-22-24
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Babel
- Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution
- By: R. F. Kuang
- Narrated by: Chris Lew Kum Hoi, Billie Fulford-Brown
- Length: 21 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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1828. Robin Swift, orphaned by cholera in Canton, is brought to London by the mysterious Professor Lovell. There, he trains for years in Latin, Ancient Greek, and Chinese, all in preparation for the day he’ll enroll in Oxford University’s prestigious Royal Institute of Translation—also known as Babel. Babel is the world's center for translation and, more importantly, magic. Silver working—the art of manifesting the meaning lost in translation using enchanted silver bars—has made the British unparalleled in power, as its knowledge serves the Empire’s quest for colonization.
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The novel language lovers have been waiting for
- By LisaLee on 09-06-22
By: R. F. Kuang
interesting
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Not my favorite, but grateful for it
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As I understand it, Parkinson's disease of the post-encephalitic and of the ordinary sort is still somewhat poorly understood fifty years after this pioneering set of trials. The idea is that administration of l-dopa, a precursor feedstock of the neurotransmitter dopamine, would compensate for the loss of the brain's ability to create the chemical on its own either due to an acute infection (the post-encephelitis lethargica cases which occurred as an epidemic in the 1920s) or some kind of autoimmune process (the conventional kind). The dopamine was then going to find its way to where it was needed by other brain structures, and the sole way the doctor had of regulating this was with the number of grams of l-dopa the patient would consume daily. There was no way of targeting the dopamine to the portions of the brain that would benefit from it and not the ones which would malfunction, causing hallucinations and tics and obsessive behavior, and since the chemical would persist in the system over time, once the undesired symptoms began to manifest there was no way to shut them down quickly. It sounds likely that the initial administration would show little effect, but as more and more was added, the patient would accumulate too much in their system and overshoot the optimum range. Most discouragingly, once the dosage had gone too far and was corrected, not everyone would be able to recover what seemed to be the best circumstances they enjoyed. A few of them even seemed to suffer permanent and crippling damage because of the regimen, which must have been a difficult thing to accept much as what happens with experimental and risky treatments of today. Maybe the most emotional part was what the patients would do and say when asked whether they wanted to continue, perhaps with a modified dosage or some other accommodation, to try to avoid Parkinsonian insensibility on the one hand and full-blown psychosis on the other. Some would ask to be taken off the drug entirely, while others would decide that the level of function the drug gave them, even with the severe side effects, was worth continuing.
There were two epilogues in the audiobook version I listened to. One was an update written about ten years after the author left off caring for this group of patients and had moved on to other postings. A very few of the original group of patients were still living by then, some still on l-dopa treatment and others having ended it. Accompanying these updates were a number of more-or-less philosophical ruminations by Sacks on what lessons he has gained over time from the experience of treating these individuals. The second epilogue concerns the behind the scenes notes connected with the Hollywood film inspired by the book and the case histories presented. The way the film actors and the director approached the depiction of the Parkinson's patients gave another glimpse of what it was like to try to take those individual's places. It will be interesting to watch the film (which I haven't seen yet) to see how closely the way I pictured the persons described matches their interpretations of the manifestations of disease and recovery.
I think that experiencing the remarkable stories of long-term institutionalization suddenly interrupted by a return to normal function, then setbacks, and more and more daunting challenges to maintain a balance is a good thing
One note on the audiobook version: there are many patients described in depth, always referred to by first name and last initial, and I thought it was difficult to keep them straight especially when the author returned to their cases, either when talking about another patient of his or in the epilogues. Since I didn't listen to the audio chapters in a continuous sitting, and since there would be only a few mentions of the patient's name, at the beginning and maybe sprinkled in among the rest of the text, it was easy to miss out on the association of the name to the specifics of the case. In a printed book or an ebook, it would be possible, although inconvenient, to look back and see what name was at the head of whatever chapter you were taking in. This is not a comment on the performance or the writing, only on a limitation of the medium.
Breaks free of clinical detachment
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Not for the average reader!
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Absolute classic!
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Reads like a text book
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Powerful!
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Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?
I would recommend this book to my friends because it is an amazing voyage you are taken on through the professional eyes of Oliver Sacks. His descriptions are poetic and allow you to understand that disease is not uniform especially anything that effects the brain.What did you like best about this story?
I loved the history of each patient and how the past of each person interacts with the L-DOPA given to each patient. Truly amazing in its artistic quality.What does Jonathan Davis and Oliver Sacks bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?
Oliver Sacks is quirky and his introduction is almost parallel to Robin Williams in the movie version of the book. Jonathan Davis is truly amazing in his connection to the subject. With Jonathan Davis as a narrator to some of the most amazing and saddening events in peoples lives there is a pathos that is undeniable and will tug at you in the most elemental or human ways.Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?
When one of the patients started to have hallucinations of a visitor to her room. She would start to get prepared for company and await her late night gentleman caller. It is amazing to hear just what human beings are capable of.Any additional comments?
Amazing! Read the book. Watch the movie. Watch the documentary. Rethink what makes you...you.Oliver Sacks puts poetry into psychology
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Nerding out.
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Fascinating Story
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