Awakenings is the extraordinary account of a group of twenty patients rendered catatonic for forty years by the sleeping-sickness epidemic that swept the world just after the First World War.
All twenty were left motionless and speechless until Dr Oliver Sacks administered a new drug which caused them to awake from their decades-long slumber.
Reviewed by Grant McIntyre in Slightly Foxed Issue 79.
‘The story of a disease that plunged its victims into a prison of viscous time, and the drug that catapulted them out of it’ Guardian
The Man Who Stopped at Nothing
Some writers lead us into lives we’d never otherwise imagine; Michael Herr, writing on the fear and madness of war, was one; Thomas Merton on monastic seclusion, another. Oliver Sacks was one as...
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