![]() ![]() “Not the first dead person with whom I’ve been having conversations,” I say. I do this not only as a way of keeping him - his voice, and our friendship - alive, but also, by imagining him as an active presence in my life, as a way of keeping myself alive. In “My Late Lunch with Oliver Sacks,” I imagine a conversation with Oliver in which we celebrate the posthumous publication of his final book of essays, Everything in Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales (2019). He was a man of many enthusiasms, about all of which he was masterfully knowledgeable: ferns, cephalopods, herring, hallucinatory drugs, music, mineralogy, language, chemistry, and much more. A physician, author, and professor of neurology, Oliver was also a bodybuilder and weightlifter (at one time he held the California state record for squat-lifting 600 pounds), an indefatigable long-distance motorcyclist (500-mile, non-stop, all-night trips, Los Angeles to the Grand Canyon), and swimmer (when he lived on City Island in the Bronx, he routinely swam around the entire island). ![]() ![]() ![]() OLIVER SACKS IS best known for his collections of essays about unusual neurological case histories - e.g., Awakenings (1973), The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985), An Anthropologist on Mars (1995), Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (2007), The Mind’s Eye (2010). ![]()
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