On the Move (Sacks)

Book Reviews
[D]eeply moving…. Dr. Sacks trains his descriptive and analytic powers on his own life, providing a revealing look at his childhood and coming of age, his discovery and embrace of his vocation, and his development as a writer. He gives us touching portraits, brimming with life and affection, of friends and family members…. This is a more intimate book than Dr. Sacks's earlier ventures into autobiographical territory…and the more he tells us about himself, the more we come to see how rooted his own gifts as an artist and a doctor are in his early family experiences in England and what he once thought of as emotional liabilities…[Sacks's] writing, which [he] says gives him a pleasure "unlike any other," has also been a gift to his readers—of erudition, sympathy and an abiding understanding of the joys, trials and consolations of the human condition.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times


With On the Move, [Sacks] has finally presented himself as he has presented others: as both fully vulnerable and an object of curiosity…. The primary mark of a good memoir is that it makes you nostalgic for experiences you never had, and Sacks captures the electrifying discoveries he made, especially those in his early career, with vivid, hard-edge prose…. Sacks's ability to enact and celebrate intuition in medicine and precision in art is singular.
Andrew Solomon - New York Times Book Review


Marvelous.... He studies himself as he has studied others: compassionately, unblinkingly, intelligently, acceptingly and honestly.
Wall Street Journal


Intriguing.... When describing his patients and their problems, he is attentive and precise, straightforward and sympathetic, and he brings these worthy qualities to his descriptions of his younger self.
Washington Post


Remarkably candid and deeply affecting.... Sacks’s empathy and intellectual curiosity, his delight in, as he calls it, "joining particulars with generalities" and, especially, "narratives with neuroscience"—have never been more evident than in his beautifully conceived new book.
Boston Globe


[A] wonderful memoir, which richly demonstrates what an extraordinary life it has been.... A fascinating account—a sort of extended case study, really—of Sacks’s remarkably active, iconoclastic adulthood.
Los Angeles Times


[Sacks is] a wonderful storyteller.... It’s his keen attentiveness as a listener and observer, and his insatiable curiosity, that makes his work so powerful.
San Francisco Chronicle


(Starred review.) Sacks's writing is lucid, earnest, and straightforward, yet always raptly attuned to subtleties of character and feeling in himself and others; the result, closely following his announcement that he has terminal cancer, is a fitting retrospective of his lifelong project of making science a deeply humanistic pursuit.
Publishers Weekly


Sacks, now 81, writes of early school memories, first loves, and his desire to travel. He even utilizes entries from a journal he kept while traveling coast to coast on a motorcycle in the United States.... Frank and candid, Sacks sounds as though he's talking to the reader from across the dinner table. His story is a reminder that we create our own journeys. —Caitlin Kenney, Niagara Falls P.L, NY
Library Journal


The prolific physician's adventure-filled life.... Describing himself as quiet, shy, and solitary, [Sacks] nevertheless has become a man of many passions: science, medicine, motorbikes, and, for years, assorted drugs.... Despite impressionistic chronology, which occasionally causes confusion and repetition, this is an engaging memoir by a consummate storyteller.
Kirkus Reviews