On the Move (Sacks)

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also, consider using these LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for On the Move:

1. After reading his autobiography, what do you think of Oliver Sacks? How would you describe him—both as a man and as a physician? How familiar were you with Sacks and his work before reading On the Move? Have you read any other books by Oliver Sacks? if so, how does this one compare?

2. During the London Blitz, Oliver and his brother Michael were sent to a boarding school where he was bullied and beaten. What effect, both good and bad, did this treatment have on his life? In what way does Sacks see those experiences as aiding him in his work with patients?

3. Talk about the various influences in Oliver's young life, including this brother's schizophrenia, that prompted him to enter medicine.

4. Sacks is open about his shyness. Elsewhere, he has likened it to a disease, although most of us would consider it simply a personality trait. What do you think? How did Sacks's shy personality shape his life?

5. Follow-up to Question 4: Given Sack's excessive shyness, how does one explain his years in California, during the 60s—his biker days, drug addiction, and obsessive body building? This immoderate risk-taking would seem at odds with a painfully shy individual. Or would it?

6. How would you describe Sacks's gifts as a physician?

7. What do you think of his mother's reaction to Sack's homosexuality? What part might her anger have played in Sacks's adult life? Although Sacks himself doesn't speculate, do you want to give it a try?

8. What do you make of Sacks's 35-year celibacy?

9. Sacks has been accused of exploiting his patients for gain and fame and for substituting empirical evidence with anecdotal evidence. If medicine is based on a strict adherence to hard data, what room is there for the "soft" patient narratives of Oliver Sacks?

10. Talk about what you found most surprising in this book—or inspiring, humorous, offensive, or anything especially memorable about Oliver Sacks and his life.

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

top of page (summary)