Dear Oliver: An Unexpected Friendship with Oliver Sacks
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A heartfelt memoir that captures the meeting of two great minds—and, with boundless generosity, shares the joy of what it's like to make, have, and keep a friend later in life
To the world, he was Dr. Sacks, the brilliant neurologist behind bestselling books like Musicophilia and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. To professor Susan Barry, he became Dear Oliver—her mentor, friend, and confidant over the course of their unlikely, engrossing ten-year correspondence.
It begins with a letter that Sue almost doesn't send. Dear Dr. Sacks . . . You asked me if I could imagine what the world would look like when viewed with two eyes. Sue’s unheard-of case history—as a “stereoblind” patient who acquired 3D vision in adulthood—so fascinates Dr. Sacks that he immediately asks to visit her. As “Stereo Sue,” she becomes the subject of one of his indelible New Yorker pieces—and, as a fellow neuroscientist, his sounding board for every kind of intellectual inquiry.
Their shared passions—from classical music to cuttlefish, brain plasticity to bioluminescent plankton—spark a friendship that buoys both of them through life’s crests and falls: as Sue becomes an author in her own right, as she supports her father in his decline, and as Oliver becomes a patient himself—battling cancer that, in a painful twist, robs him of his own vision.
Dr. Sacks’s letters to Sue offer his devoted readers an unprecedented glimpse of the man himself—from his legendary compassion and insight to his love of the periodic table (which he kept in his wallet). Throughout Dear Oliver, we are reminded that true friends help each other see the world a little differently.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Neurobiologist Barry (Fixing My Gaze) offers a nuanced and moving look at her relationship with renowned neurologist Sacks (1933–2015), whom she got to know after becoming one of his case studies. The two first met, briefly, in 1996, at a reception for Barry's astronaut husband, but it was only in 2005 that Barry wrote to Sacks to share that, with the recent intervention of an optometrist, she'd regained sight in both eyes after strabismus (crossed eyes) had led to blindness in one. Her letter elicited an enthusiastic response from Sacks, who asked for permission to write about Barry's experiences. The ensuing essay, "Stereo Sue," explained the challenges involved with a lack of stereoscopic (two-eyed) vision. Over the next decade, Barry and Sacks became close friends, exchanging more than 150 letters before Sacks's death from cancer. Barry conveys the deep warmth and compassion these late-in-life confidants offered each other—and even includes images of Sacks's type-written letters, complete with cross-outs and handwritten additions—making the book's later sections, which document how Sacks's cancer spread and became terminal, especially poignant. It adds up to a deeply stirring ode to life-altering connections that arrive when they're least expected.
