Everything in Its Place

From the bestselling author of On Gratitude, On the Move and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.In this spirited volume, neurologist Oliver Sacks examines the many passions of his own life – both as a doctor engaged with the central questions of human existence, and as a polymath conversant in all the sciences. Why do humans need gardens? How, and when, does a physician tell his patient she has Alzheimer’s? What is social media doing to our brains?In several of the compassionate case histories collected here, Sacks considers for the first time the enigmas of depression, psychosis and schizophrenia, and in others he returns to conditions that have long fascinated him: Tourette’s syndrome, ageing, dementia and hallucinations. In counterpoint to these elegant investigations of what makes us human, this volume also includes pieces that celebrate Sacks’s love of the natural world – and his last meditations on life in the twenty-first century. Everything in Its Place gives us an intimate portrait of a master writer and thinker at work.‘Life bursts through all of Oliver Sacks’s writing. He was and will remain a brilliant singularity’ – The New York Times Book ReviewNow part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the very best of modern literature.

Oliver Sacks was born in 1933 in London and was educated at the Queen’s College, Oxford. He completed his medical training at San Francisco’s Mount Zion Hospital and at UCLA before moving to New York, where he soon encountered the patients about whom he would write in his book Awakenings.Dr Sacks spent almost fifty years working as a neurologist and wrote many books, including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Musicophilia and Hallucinations, about the strange neurological predicaments and conditions of his patients. The New York Times referred to him as ‘the poet laureate of medicine’, and over the years he received many awards, including honours from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Royal College of Physicians. In 2008, he was appointed Commander of the British Empire. His memoir, On the Move, was published shortly before his death in August 2015.