In Search of Self and Science
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COMMENT BOOKS & ARTS On the Move: A career as a best-selling Life author and man- OLIVER SACKS about-neuroscience. Alfred A. Knopf: 2015. None of Sacks’s journey into mythic America was planned. DOUGLAS WHITE The enthusiastic biker who first crossed the Atlantic from Britain in 1960 with vague dreams of joining the Royal Canadian Air Force or becoming a lumberjack instead achieved enduring recognition and status as professor of neurology at New York University. But you might not predict it from this account of uncertain beginnings and peripatetic adventures. Sacks, who had been a junior doctor at the Middlesex Hospital in London, became an intern of uncertain migrant status working with neurosurgeons at Mount Zion Hos- pital in San Francisco. He fell in love with California, and hung around Muscle Beach in Santa Monica, birthplace of the US gym revolution. Here as elsewhere, he did noth- ing by halves, consuming “five double cheeseburgers and half a dozen milkshakes per evening” to bulk up for his power lifts. He broke a weightlifting record (“a squat with a 600-pound bar on my shoulders”) and several bones. His capacity for alcohol matched his appetite for learning (at around 17, deep in James Joyce’s titanic 1922 novel Ulysses, he sipped his way through a litre of aquavit during the North Sea ferry cross- ing from Norway) and his ability to connect with others. That talent was to inform his understand- ing of patients, colleagues and readers. His friends have ranged from truck drivers and Hells Angels to polymath-director-scientist Oliver Sacks in New York in 1961. Jonathan Miller, geneticist Francis Crick, poet W. H. Auden — and Hollywood star AUTOBIOGRAPHY and muscleman connoisseur Mae West, who chatted him up while he was moonlighting at a Los Angeles hospital. At the heart of this picaresque adventure In search of self is an unhappy secret. When Sacks admitted in 1951, aged 18, that he might prefer boys to girls, his mother called him “an abomi- nation” and wished that he had never been and science born. However, nothing ‘abominable’ had yet happened. That was to hit several years later, when, determined to lose his virginity, he Tim Radford revels in Oliver Sacks’s memoir of his youth headed to Amsterdam and its gay bars, but as a biker, druggie, muscle-builder — and scientist. drank so much gin that he was unconscious during his deflowering. Sacks was not without connections and young man sets out to find himself. the patience for research. He is drawn to the luck — a loving medical family in London, He discovers motorbikes, leather, helpless, the hopeless and the lost, but man- a scholarship to the University of Oxford, speed and thrills, lives on a kibbutz ages to annoy the hell out of his peers, so he cousins including iconic US cartoonist Aand has a learning experience with a prosti- drifts from job to job. Al Capp and Abba Eban, the Israeli scholar tute in Paris. (The climax is a shared pot of This is the stuff of a certain kind of mid- and diplomat. After the success of Sacks’s lapsang souchong tea.) In the United States, twentieth-century novel. It is also the youth first book, Migraine (Vintage, 1970), his as a young medic, he takes to the road on his chronicled by Oliver Sacks in what might be father joked that motorcycle: Easy Rider in the landscape of his final reminiscence, On the Move. If it is he no longer spoke NATURE.COM John Steinbeck. He also takes to marijuana, the last, it is the coda to an astonishing life: of himself as “Abba For more on Sacks in LSD, methamphetamine and morning-glory Sacks is a scientist, a doctor of medicine and a Eban’s uncle” but as the Nature Podcast: seeds. He has the appetite for science but not clinical consultant who has also had a brilliant “the father of Oliver go.nature.com/awsgzg 158 | NATURE | VOL 521 | 14 MAY 2015 © 2015 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved BOOKS & ARTS COMMENT Sacks”. And can he write? Over his life, SCIENCE FICTION Sacks has filled 1,000 notebooks and journals, not counting journalism, medical notes and a lost suitcase full of photographs and notes — written in After the cataclysm bars and restaurants, up mountains and in airports. He has more than a dozen John Gilbey delights in a vast, technologically charged books in print. Harold Pinter wrote a tale from a science-fiction supremo at the top of his game. play inspired by his second book, Awak- enings (HarperPerennial, 1973); Penny Marshall directed the film. Awakenings eal Stephenson writes Earth undergoes a catastrophic also inspired a ballet, and Peter Brook big science fiction, transformation in Seveneves. directed a French theatre production literally and figu- of The Man Who Mistook His Wife For Nratively. Weighing in at machinery and off-world MARK GARLICK/SPL A Hat (Summit, 1985). Michael Nyman some 900 pages and habitats, and shares wrote an opera on the same work. stretching nearly 5,000 Stephenson’s delight in Some of On The Move feels ripe for years into humanity’s clever characterization a US heavyweight such as the novelist future, Seveneves is no and off-beat humour. James Baldwin. Other parts are untidily exception. Arthur C. Clarke’s The told, padded with extracts from letters It traces an epoch Fountains of Paradise home or the young adventurer’s first in which humankind (1979) embodies related attempts at writing. It is not quite clear and the environment technical solutions, and how that youthful, ready-for-anything change profoundly. The has a postscript that makes medic meta- bulk of the novel is the lead- a temporal and socio-biolog- “This is a morphosed into up to, and immediate aftermath ical leap of the same scale. Olaf compelling a distinguished of, a stunning cosmic event that Stapledon’s classic Last and First Men front-line professor. We leaves humanity teetering on the edge. The (1930) paints a similarly portentous picture dispatch from piece the story remainder describes a renaissance with only of genetic manipulation, cosmic cataclysm half a century’s together from faint echoes of what we recognize as human and the potential future forms of humanity wonderful anecdotes of fool- culture. — albeit with a massively larger scope and exploration hardy adventure The cataclysm is the destruction of the extending forwards for millions of years. But of brain, mind and episodes of Moon by a mysterious agent. As Earth what distinguishes Seveneves for me is Ste- and nervous clinical encoun- is assaulted by a rain of debris from the phenson’s handling of the characters. There is system.” ter. Sacks writes shattered satellite, the vast majority of the an almost Malthusian detachment in how he about people with human population faces oblivion. The core introduces, builds, then violently dispatches migraines, Tourette’s syndrome or Par- of the story relies on current, or currently characters who in novels with less robust rea- kinson’s disease, autism, epilepsy, colour anticipated, technologies — weaving a plau- soning would be saved by a clever plot device. blindness, serious mental illness and the sible tale of how a tiny number of survivors, This is hard sci-fi in a real and welcome post-encephalitics of the Beth Abraham the “seveneves” of the title, might secure a sense, ruled by unremitting physical laws, Hospital in the Bronx, New York, who are future for our species. Stephenson imagines unlike the negotiable rules of the action the subjects of Awakenings. These are the the rebirth as a division into seven races, thriller. People die because their deaths stuff of his books: not just medical cases, based on the genetic profiles of the found- are inevitable, and many pass unremarked but warm, quirky and aware. ers. The future cultures have both old and because the disaster’s scale is so vast. Their This is another compelling front-line new social problems, but also fresh insights sacrifice is tied to the theme of engineering dispatch from half a century’s wonderful and resources with which to address them. the survival of the human race. Science fic- exploration of brain, mind and nervous The epic injury to Earth looms in the very tion often suffers from a disparity between system. It is a valedictory memoir, and first sentence: a masterful attention-grabber. the impressive scale of the scenery, and the one with a tentatively happy ending. At Stephenson maintains tension and energy, size of the characters and how they are devel- 76, this lonely writer (“it has sometimes as well as a remarkable technical complex- oped. Stephenson balances these aspects well, seemed to me that I have lived at a cer- ity, both literary and scientific. I repeatedly avoiding cookie-cutter scientists and the all- tain distance from life”) found enduring found myself sketching parts of the dramati- too-common characterization of technolo- love. But the book’s text was handed to cally scaled mechanical constructs that enable gists as brilliant but conflicted renegades. the publisher before Sacks, now 81, was later stages of the story — such as whip-like I did find myself mulling over the casting diagnosed with cancer of the liver. He has machinery to capture for the film that is sure to follow. Some- just written about that in The New York high-flying gliders one needs to talk to Morgan Freeman’s Review of Books, and of — in the words and transfer them to agent, that’s all I’m saying. And an almost of Friedrich Nietzsche — “a reawakened Earth orbit — to judge throwaway early scene is never quite faith in a tomorrow and the day after whether they were fea- resolved, making it clear that there is signifi- tomorrow”.