Awakenings

Rating:
Summary: Wonderfully written, but less than that of his other work...
Review: If I had never read "The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat" before this book (both by the same author), I would have rated this as a five-star classic. Though as well written as the other work, this book presents his studies in a less humane, and more scientific way. Read the other work and one will sense the noticeable difference in the way that Dr. Sacks approached his patients. When reading the "Awakenings", I felt as a detached bystander looking through the windows of his clinic and observing the patients. When reading "The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat", I was so engaged by Dr. Sacks vivid descriptions of the patients, physically, intellectually, emotionally and spiritually, that it was as if I was face-to-face with the patients, and that I was connected in some intrinsic way to each and every one of them. Please please read the other work as well as this one.

Rating:
Summary: Medical Case histories as great art
Review: Oliver Sacks has elevated the case history in Awakenings to a literary art form of the highest kind. A neurologist in charge of a ward of people left high and dry by the 1918 flu epidemic which left them in a profound catatonic state, an extreme form of Parkinson's, he experiments on his patients with a new wonder drug L-Dopa which proves a mixed blessing for them. Some are awakened to brilliant life for a brief time, but most of them are doomed either to revert to their original condition or to die (several know they are going to die and announce the fact). Dr. Sacks (who looks quite demonic on the cover photo) uses his medical powers to change lives with a high-handedness that is almost Faustian. The effects are so extraordinary and strange that some of these stories read like the finest fantasy. All the stories are wonderfully strange, proving that human consciousness is many-faceted and that what we label "disease" may be merely a new avenue of perception. Some of these people perform acts not only bizarre but improbable, showing an unusual level of vitality and no ordinary degree of power. There are people here able to fill whole buckets with their saliva, people who rise from beds they have not left for 30 years with no muscle atrophy, people whose extraperception provide them with a life invisible to others, people who fall into pits unseen by anyone else in a perfectly ordinary hospital hall, unless securely in contact with others, people who can only move "normally" to music, people occupying a strange anachronistic limbo, stuck in the time when they first fell ill, and people who move as slowly as plants grow, whose time sense is distorted so that they seem motionless as statues for hours of a time arrested in mid-movement, though in their own perception, they are completing an activity (brushing their hair) at an ordinary pace. This is Sack's greatest work, a riveting portrait of human possibilities at their most extreme.

Rating:
Summary: Compelling documentation
Review: One of the things I find most striking about Oliver Sacks is his humanity. I find myself instilled with his sense of compassion and understanding by reading his cases.

Awakenings succeeds at being accessible to both the layperson and professional, and captivating both. There is a glossary to familiarize yourself with neurological terminology, but again the book isn't overtly prolix; rather a gripping account of neurological maladies.

Through Mr.Sack's these patients have received a certain immortality; a sense that their suffering has not been in vain, but tremendously valuable, not only to the advancement of neurology but as testament to the inherent strength and resolve in us all.

Rating:
Summary: A Classic
Review: The 20th Century has ended, and we can look back on this famous classic with perhaps a better perspective. It in its own way has moved mountains of ignorance. It brought life to not only the patients in the book, but millions of neurologically impared patients in the world. It explained, along with the great movie 'Awakenings', how one could live but not really have complete life. This is a tragedy the medical profession must continue to confront with better research and treatment. Oliver Sacks originally wanted to be a researcher, but it was not in his destiny. What he became, as documented in this book, was a unique facilitator of science. He became a truly unique being that has blessed our humanity.