Awakenings

Oliver Sacks, Oliver W. Sacks

Knopf Canada, Nov 13, 2008 - Medical - 408 pages

Awakenings — which inspired the major motion picture — is the remarkable story of a group of patients who contracted sleeping-sickness during the great epidemic just after World War I. Frozen for decades in a trance-like state, these men and women were given up as hopeless until 1969, when Dr. Oliver Sacks gave them the then-new drug L-DOPA, which had an astonishing, explosive, "awakening" effect. Dr. Sacks recounts the moving case histories of his patients, their lives, and the extraordinary transformations which went with their reintroduction to a changed world.

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - homeschoolmimzi - LibraryThing

I like this author a lot, and the premise of the book was interesting, but Sacks being a neurologist infuses his stories w/a bit too many technical terms, and it soon starts to read like a medical record after awhile.

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - William345 - LibraryThing

The crux of the book is the work Sacks began in the mid-1960s with dozens of post-encephalitic patients at Bronx's Beth Abraham hospital, then called the Bronx Home for Incurables and disguised here ...

About the author

Oliver Sacks is the author of Awakenings, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and many other books, for which he has received numerous awards, including the Hawthornden Prize, a Polk Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and lives in New York City, where he is a practicing neurologist. He recently accepted a new position at Columbia University.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Awakenings
• Authors: Oliver Sacks, Oliver W. Sacks
• Publisher: Knopf Canada, 2008
• ISBN: 0307398153, 9780307398154
• Length: 408 pages
• Subjects: Medical / Neurology; Psychology / Neuropsychology