Vintage Sacks

Wow, I was going to post the next paragraph as a comment to the blog entry I thought I made months ago and discovered it was still in my draft file. Must have buried it under newer entries, Now I am resolved to look it over again, correct typos and publish it with intended comment leading off.

Antonia Fraser and her husband, Harold Pinter, visited Ollie [aka Dr. Oliver Sacks] at his "little dark-red clapboard house" on City Island, a most un Bronx-like section of the Bronx. The only other details she provides about the house was that it had a porch and "was extremely close to the sea. She also mentions that Sacks told her and Pinter that he swam "in and out of the moored boats like a seal." Fraser, Antonia, Must You Go? My Life with Harold Pinter, p.141. A line from Awakenings was the seed of inspiration for Pinter's play A Kind of Alaska which premiered at the NT with Judi Dench as Deborah.

A friend of mine occasionally bikes on City Island so I've asked him to check this out and send me a photo if he identifies the place. Of course, many of the houses on the island are near water and piers -- several films have been shot on City Island as was much of the final episode of the U.S. version of Life on Mars if you want some idea of the area. In any case, if I get a photo of Oliver Sack's [old?] house, I'll share it here.

Like many people I first became aware of the work of Dr. Oliver Sacks from the 1990 film, Awakenings. Memorably portrayed by Robin Williams, the film's neurologist finds that a new drug, L-DOPA, "awakens" patients who survived the 1917-1928 epidemic of encephalitis lethargica but have spent the intervening 30-40 years in a catatonic state. The movie was a fictionalized version of the book of the in which Dr. Sacks chronicled of his efforts in the late 1960s to help patients at Beth Abraham Hospital, a Bronx, New York hospital, which was providing long-term care for a sizable group of individuals who had contacted this form of "sleeping sickness."

Oliver Sacks is a master storyteller and Vintage Sacks shows him to great advantage. For readers who must read Sacks' work as soon as it is published, this collection serves to highlight the best and possibly refresh the memory. For those like me who haven't done as good a job keeping it up, it was a re-introduction to a remarkable human being and scientist who could have had a full-time career as a writer, if the mysteries of the human neurological system hadn't led him along another path.