I’ve been reading Oliver Sacks’ Everything in its Place: First Loves and Last Tales, a posthumous collection of essays by a master of that form. That he was a master of so much else — neurology, weightlifting, chemistry — ripples out from every page.

Sacks loved to swim, to walk in botanical gardens, to study ferns in Central Park, and the book contains short chapters on these topics and many more, easy explorations in the personal essay form. They move from the particular to the general, are informal and discursive. 

Sacks is most well-known for his book Awakenings, which chronicles his treatment of patients with a rare sleeping sickness, people who had missed whole decades of life then woke up and found themselves once again in the land of the living. 

Awake is how I feel after reading the work of this scientist and writer, gone almost 10 years but alive to me now thanks to this final, exhilarating collection. 

(Sacks’ signature courtesy Wikipedia)