Gratitude“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 |
What people are saying - Write a review
User ratings
5 stars |
| ||
4 stars |
| ||
3 stars |
| ||
2 stars |
| ||
1 star |
|
LibraryThing Review
User Review - JBD1 - LibraryThingFour of Sacks' final essays, each lovely and Sacksian. I lament that we won't have any new essays by this wonderful writer: we will not see his like again. Read full review
LibraryThing Review
User Review - judithrs - LibraryThingGratitude. Oliver Sacks. 2015. I found this book on a list from Book Riot within minutes of getting an email from a friend who just found out that one of her best friends had died. As soon as I read ... Read full review
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
AAKnopf.com able Auden Australia Awakenings beautiful Beckett BILL HAYES bismuth boyhood celebrate chant children and grandchildren community in Cricklewood complete my memoir conscious cousins David Hume death deepen dementia diagnosis dream eightieth eighty element encouraged energy essay face with dying family visit father felt find my thoughts Francis Crick friends glad global warming Gratitude hard problem Hume’s hundredth birthday intercourse Israel Jewish community July Kiddush kosher lead casket learned Lemurs lived liver meal Mercury metal metastases metastatic cancer mild disposition Mistook His Wife months morning mother Move Musicophilia neutrons night Nobel Prize nuclear physics numbers ocular melanoma OLIVER SACKS one’s Orthodox parents patients Periodic Table physicians polonium prayer protons published Robert John Sabbath say farewell second birthday sense Shabbos short of breath shul sixty sort Stockholm swim synagogue terminal illness thorium weeks Wilczek wrote York youngest