Obituary Oliver Sack – New Yorker writer and neurologist died – Frankfurter Rundschau

August 30, 2015

The New York neurologist and bestselling author Oliver Sacks, launched in October 1989. Photo: AP

To the death of the great author and neuroscientist Oliver Sacks , He wanted to travel, write yet, friendships deepen, do stupid things. He was ill with cancer and had given in February in a contact item for the “New York Times” a few more months to live.

On Sunday, the writer and neurologist Oliver Sacks died in New York. He was ill with cancer and had given in February in an article touching on the “New York Times” a few more months to live. Downright professional fatalism, but also courage and love of life spoke his words. He wanted to travel, write yet, friendships deepen, do stupid things. His 82nd birthday on July 9 he was still “in style” celebrations, he later wrote.
fear of dying, he had, of course, but with no other certainty is about greater that did not leave his spirit of research and his joy in the so sensible as rich natural puzzles to last him his curiosity. Perhaps the strongest texts in his extensive work, the autobiographical, where they can not be separated from his scientific work.

In “Uncle Tungsten” he told just only one level of his eventful life, from his Orthodox Jewish ancestors from Russia, of his war childhood in an English boarding school, from his life threatening experiments with the chemistry set. As the same time he sings an ode to the Periodic Table of Elements – so devotedly, that even though you never had with chemistry care much, once even want to discover any element and can see no light bulb without using heat to Sacks’ ancestors – large lamp inventor – to think.

But then it drove him rather on the other side of his large family, and he was, like his father and his mother a doctor. He studied medicine at Oxford and tried out as a researcher, which he proved too scatterbrained; He also developed sympathies with the chickens and other animals. In 1960, with twenty years, he went to the US, continued his academic and clinical career and experienced with his popular science patient stories his breakthrough as a writer. In addition, he wrote in his second autobiography, which was published this year: “On the Move” (see FR, 22. 8.).

ignorance did not slow him

concerns or envious rivals could not stop him. He apparently had such irrepressible life force that he preferred a room temperature of 14 degrees Celsius. He jetted with his motorcycles across the prairie, swam for hours, trained in weightlifting, and he spent many a weekend bike rides, during which he slowly emptied two hung on the handlebars two-liter jugs of cider and slightly tipsy drove through the summer.

He caught fire while reading poems and at the meeting with poets, suffered intense, but never very tough love stories used sprawling correspondences and was of course at all times for his patients there. For dinner he never took more time than to open a fish box or a cereal box is necessary. Sacks stormed with cheerful exuberance and more generous insatiability through life, paid for a drug and soul crisis the price of the hustle and Danebensein. He was only in later years the quieter happiness of pause: He was 77 when he met his man for life, the writer Billy Hayes: “It was a new experience for me, to lie quietly in the arms of others, to talk, listen to music or to be silent together. We learned to cook proper meals and to eat -. A great and unexpected gift in my advanced age, after I had my whole life maintained distance “

From our readers took Oliver Sacks in his recent “New York Times” article farewell, he appeared two weeks ago, on August 14: “I feel like my thoughts to drift Sabbath, the day of rest, the seventh day of the week and maybe the seventh day the life of someone who can say the work is done, and the rest with a clear conscience. “This is a sentence, according to which one can lay his pen.