Book description
‘The story of a disease that plunged its victims into a prison of
viscous time, and the drug that catapulted them out of it’
Guardian
Hailed as a medical classic, and the subject of a major feature film as
well as radio and stage plays and various TV documentaries, Awakenings
is the extraordinary account of a group of twenty patients. Rendered
catatonic by the sleeping-sickness epidemic that swept the world just
after the First World War, all twenty had spent forty years in hospital:
motionless and speechless; aware of the world around them, but
exhibiting no interest in it - until Dr Sacks administered the then-new
drug, L-DOPA, which caused them, temporarily, to awake from their
decades-long slumber.
‘A brilliant and humane book’ Observer
‘Not only a collection of astonishing case histories, Awakenings
is also a memoir, a moral essay and a romance. It is a work of genius’
Washington Post
‘It makes you aware of what a knife edge we live on’ Doris Lessing
Oliver Sacks was educated in London, Oxford, California and New York. He
is a professor of clinical neurology at Albert Einstein College of
Medicine. He is the author of many books, including the bestselling
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
and Awakenings
.
