If you love fascinating tidbits, this book of uncollected or previously unpublished essays is for you. Fossil records show how, when most of the world’s plants and land animals were killed during a “great extinction” in the Cretaceous period, “life came bursting back in the form of ferns.” We get excited about, say, ferns because he is so into their beauty and resilience. For Sacks it’s more about enthusing his way to promote appreciation (and greater understanding). Much science writing for a general readership strains to explain specialized topics. The term diminishes their remarkable mash-up of scientific knowledge and the messier, more chaotic passions of life as we live it. A practicing physician and professor of neurology who died in 2015, he wrote a stack of well-received nonfiction books that fall in the category of science popularizers. Sacks possesses the crucial knack of neither dumbing down nor writing over the head of a lay reader. Oliver Sacks, however, has a way of writing about his areas of lifelong interest - they include libraries, neurological disorders, botany and the history of science - that never fails to captivate me even if they are far from my own passions. As anyone who’s been cornered by a dullard at a party knows, one person’s fascinations do not always prove interesting in the telling.
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May 2023
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