Letters
09 October 2025Synopsis
'Oliver Sacks’s Letters isn’t a book of the year – it’s a book for a lifetime . . . Keep this by your side, dip into it, be reminded of the wonders of our shared humanity' – Erica Wagner, 'Books of the year 2024', New StatesmanA New Yorker and New Statesman Book of the Year 2024
Oliver Sacks, one of the great humanists of our age – who describes himself in these pages as a ‘philosophical physician’ and an ‘astronomer of the inward’ – wrote to an eclectic array of family and friends. Most were scientists, artists, and writers, even statesmen: Francis Crick, Antonio Damasio, Jane Goodall, W. H. Auden, Susan Sontag, Stephen Jay Gould, Björk, and his first cousin, Abba Eban. But many of the most eloquent letters in this collection are addressed to the ordinary people who wrote to him with their odd symptoms and questions, to whom he responds with a sense of generosity and wonder.
With some correspondents, Sacks shares his struggle for recognition and acceptance both as a physician and as a gay man, providing intimate accounts as well of his passions for competitive weightlifting, motorcycles, botany, and music. With others, he chronicles his penchant for testing the boundaries of authority, the discovery of his writer’s voice, and his explosive seasons of discovery with the patients who populate his book Awakenings.
His descriptions of travels as a young man and the extraordinary people he encounters can be lyrical, ferocious, penetrating and hilarious. Many of his musings include the first detailed sketches of an essay forming in his mind, or miniature case histories rivalling those in his beloved essay collections.
Sensitively selected and introduced by Kate Edgar, Sacks’s longtime editor, the letters trace the arc of a remarkable life and reveal an often surprising portrait of Sacks as he wrestles with the workings of his own brain and mind.
'Here is the unedited Oliver Sacks – struggling, passionate, a furiously intelligent misfit. And also endless interesting. He was a man like no other' – Atul Gawande, author of Being Mortal
'Sacks is an endearing and entertaining prose stylist – inquisitive, often funny, never obtuse . . . Letters is crammed with off-the-cuff profundities, moments of elevated perception that briefly unriddle the more inscrutable aspects of human nature.' – Ralf Webb, Guardian
Details
09 October 2025
9781509821846Reviews
A brilliant and vivid mind, a man whose intellectual appetite was vast . . . Sacks is an endearing and entertaining prose stylist – inquisitive, often funny, never obtuse . . . Letters is crammed with off-the-cuff profundities, moments of elevated perception that briefly unriddle the more inscrutable aspects of human natureRalf Webb, 'Book of the day', The Guardian
Here is the unedited Oliver Sacks—struggling, passionate, a furiously intelligent misfit. And also endless interesting. He was a man like no otherAtul Gawande, author of Being Mortal
Here is Oliver Sacks annealed. All his largehearted curiosity, all his childlike wonder at how everything coheres, all the self-doubt trembling beneath his brilliance, come alive on these pages. One is left magnified just by bearing witness to this vast and solitary mind, searching for connection and discovering himselfMaria Popova, author of Figuring
This collection of correspondence only cements Sacks’s legacy as a man of great compassion . . . Sacks showed generations of doctors (and patients) how medicine is just the starting point for an exploration of the possibilities of being human. With these letters, his legacy as an extraordinary writer, humanitarian and physician is securedThe Observer
