My
predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved. I have
been given much and I have given something in return. Above all, I have been
a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in
itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.

-Oliver Sacks

No writer has succeeded in capturing the medical and human drama of illness
as honestly and as eloquently as Oliver Sacks.

During the last few months of his life, he wrote a set of essays in which
he movingly explored his feelings about completing a life and coming to terms
with his own death.

It is the fate of every human being, Sacks writes, to be a unique individual,
to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.

Together, these four essays form an ode to the uniqueness of each human
being and to gratitude for the gift of life.

Oliver Sacks was like no other clinician, or writer. He was drawn to the
homes of the sick, the institutions of the most frail and disabled, the
company of the unusual and the ‘abnormal.’ He wanted to see humanity in its
many variants and to do so in his own, almost anachronistic way-face to face,
over time, away from our burgeoning apparatus of computers and algorithms.
And, through his writing, he showed us what he saw.

-Atul Gawande, author of Being Mortal