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I am shy in ordinary social contexts I am not able to “chat” with any ease I have difficulty recognizing people (this is lifelong, though worse now my eyesight is impaired) I have little knowledge of and little interest in current affairs, whether political, social, or sexual.
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At eighty, he reflects on a defining feature of his interior landscape: Sacks’s character springs from the common root of his pain and his pleasure.
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Like Marie Curie, whose wounds and power sprang from the same source, Dr. Sacks on the set of the cinematic adaptation of his book Awakenings, with Robin Williams, 1989 (Courtesy of Oliver Sacks) Sacks’s intellectual footprint and left with deep love for his soul. This record of time pouring through the unclenched fingers of the mind’s most magnanimous patron saint has become one of the most rewarding reading experiences of my life - one I came to with deep reverence for Dr. Sacks’s death shortly after its release, is not so much an autobiography in the strict sense as a dialogue with time on the simultaneous scales of the personal (going from world-champion weightlifter to world-renowned neurologist), the cultural (being a gay man looking for true love in the 1960s was nothing like it is in our post-DOMA, beTindered present), and the civilizational (watching horseshoe crabs mate on the beaches of City Island exactly as they did 400 million years ago on the shores of Earth’s primordial seas). The book, made all the more poignant by Dr. Oliver Sacks (Photograph: Nicholas Naylor-Leland) In one final gesture of generosity, this cartographer of the mind and its meaning mapped the landscape of his remarkable character and career in On the Move: A Life ( public library) - an uncommonly moving autobiography, titled after a line from a poem by his dear friend Thom Gunn: “At worst,” wrote Gunn, “one is in motion and at best, / Reaching no absolute, in which to rest, / One is always nearer by not keeping still.” Sacks’s unstillness is that of a life defined by a compassionate curiosity - about the human mind, about the human spirit, about the invisibilia of our inner lives. “I have been able to see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts,” Oliver Sacks wrote in his poignant, beautiful, and courageous farewell to life. In the spirit of treating my annual best-of reading lists as a sort of Old Year’s resolutions in reverse, reflecting not aspirational priorities for the new year but what proved most worth prioritizing over the year past, here are the fifteen most rewarding books I read in 2015, following the subject-specific selections of the year’s best art books, best science books, and best children’s books.