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Uncle Tungsten - Oliver Sacks

By Oliver Sacks

Release Date: 2001-10-16

Genre: Biographies & Memoirs

4 (6 ratings)
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From the distinguished neurologist who is also one of the most remarkable storytellers of our time—a riveting memoir of his youth and his love affair with science, as unexpected and fascinating as his celebrated case histories.

“A rare gem…. Fresh, joyous, wistful, generous, and tough-minded.” —The New York Times Book Review

Long before Oliver Sacks became the bestselling author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Awakenings, he was a small English boy fascinated by metals—also by chemical reactions (the louder and smellier the better), photography, squids and cuttlefish, H.G. Wells, and the periodic table. In this endlessly charming and eloquent memoir, Sacks chronicles his love affair with science and the magnificently odd and sometimes harrowing childhood in which that love affair unfolded.

In Uncle Tungsten we meet Sacks’ extraordinary family, from his surgeon mother (who introduces the fourteen-year-old Oliver to the art of human dissection) and his father, a family doctor who imbues in his son an early enthusiasm for housecalls, to his “Uncle Tungsten,” whose factory produces tungsten-filament lightbulbs. We follow the young Oliver as he is exiled at the age of six to a grim, sadistic boarding school to escape the London Blitz, and later watch as he sets about passionately reliving the exploits of his chemical heroes—in his own home laboratory. Uncle Tungsten is a crystalline view of a brilliant young mind springing to life, a story of growing up which is by turns elegiac, comic, and wistful, full of the electrifying joy of discovery.

Uncle Tungsten - Oliver Sacks

By Oliver Sacks

Release Date: 2001-10-16

Genre: Biographies & Memoirs

4 (6 ratings)
Read Download
From the distinguished neurologist who is also one of the most remarkable storytellers of our time—a riveting memoir of his youth and his love affair with science, as unexpected and fascinating as his celebrated case histories.

“A rare gem…. Fresh, joyous, wistful, generous, and tough-minded.” —The New York Times Book Review

Long before Oliver Sacks became the bestselling author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Awakenings, he was a small English boy fascinated by metals—also by chemical reactions (the louder and smellier the better), photography, squids and cuttlefish, H.G. Wells, and the periodic table. In this endlessly charming and eloquent memoir, Sacks chronicles his love affair with science and the magnificently odd and sometimes harrowing childhood in which that love affair unfolded.

In Uncle Tungsten we meet Sacks’ extraordinary family, from his surgeon mother (who introduces the fourteen-year-old Oliver to the art of human dissection) and his father, a family doctor who imbues in his son an early enthusiasm for housecalls, to his “Uncle Tungsten,” whose factory produces tungsten-filament lightbulbs. We follow the young Oliver as he is exiled at the age of six to a grim, sadistic boarding school to escape the London Blitz, and later watch as he sets about passionately reliving the exploits of his chemical heroes—in his own home laboratory. Uncle Tungsten is a crystalline view of a brilliant young mind springing to life, a story of growing up which is by turns elegiac, comic, and wistful, full of the electrifying joy of discovery.

More by Oliver Sacks

On the Move

Gratitude

Hallucinations

Musicophilia

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

An Anthropologist on Mars

The Mind's Eye

Awakenings

The River of Consciousness

Uncle Tungsten

Migraine

Oaxaca Journal

The Island of the Colorblind

Seeing Voices

Everything in Its Place

Oliver Sacks: The Last Interview

A Leg to Stand On

Fixing My Gaze

Vintage Sacks

The Creative Self

El hombre que confundiĂł a su mujer con un sombrero

Letters

Un antropĂłlogo en Marte

Alucinaciones

El rĂ­o de la conciencia

En movimiento

Musicofilia

Gratitud

In movimento

L’uomo che scambiò sua moglie per un cappello

Veo una voz

L'homme qui prenait sa femme pour un chapeau, et autres rĂŠcits cliniques

On the Move

Un antropologo su Marte

Allucinazioni

Diario de Oaxaca

Onkel Wolfram

MozgĂĄsban

Musicophilia - La musique, le cerveau et nous

La isla de los ciegos al color

Su una gamba sola

Unchiul Tungsten

De rivier van het bewustzijn

Gratitudine

Der Strom des Bewusstseins

Diario di Oaxaca

Eerste liefdes en laatste verhalen

Un problema musicale

Drachen, Doppelgänger und Dämonen

Die Insel der Farbenblinden

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