Get Free Shipping on orders over $79
Awakenings : Picador Collection - Oliver Sacks

Awakenings

By: Oliver Sacks

Paperback | 26 September 2023

At a Glance

Paperback


$32.75

or 4 interest-free payments of $8.19 with

 or 

Ships in 10 to 15 business days

'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

Hailed as a medical classic, and the subject of a major feature film as well as radio and stage plays and various TV documentaries, Awakenings by Oliver Sacks is the extraordinary account of a group of twenty patients.

Rendered catatonic by the sleeping-sickness epidemic that swept the world just after the First World War, all twenty had spent forty years in hospital: motionless and speechless; aware of the world around them, but exhibiting no interest in it – until Dr Sacks administered the then-new drug, L-DOPA, which caused them, temporarily, to awake from their decades-long slumber . . .

About the Author

Oliver Sacks was born in 1933 in London and was educated at Queen’s College, Oxford. He completed his medical training at San Francisco’s Mount Zion Hospital and at UCLA before moving to New York, where he soon encountered the patients whom he would write about in his book Awakenings.

Dr Sacks spent almost fifty years working as a neurologist and wrote many books, including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Musicophilia, and Hallucinations, about the strange neurological predicaments and conditions of his patients. The New York Times referred to him as ‘the poet laureate of medicine’, and over the years he received many awards, including honours from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Royal College of Physicians. In 2008, he was appointed Commander of the British Empire. His memoir, On the Move, was published shortly before his death in August 2015.

More in True Stories

The Mushroom Tapes : Conversations on a Triple Murder Trial - Helen Garner
The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective - Sara Lodge
Inside the Mind of the Backpacker Killer : Ivan Milat - Jeremy Daniel
The Good Cop : The True Story of Ron Iddles - Justine Ford

RRP $24.99

$21.75

13%
OFF
Australia's Most Unbelievable True Stories - Jim Haynes

RRP $24.99

$21.75

13%
OFF
Survivors : Inspiring True Stories of Survival - Ben Hubbard

RRP $22.99

$20.75

10%
OFF
Love Stories - Trent Dalton

Hardcover

RRP $34.99

$28.75

18%
OFF
Great Australian Outback Nurses Stories - Bill Marsh

RRP $34.99

$28.75

18%
OFF
The Gulag Archipelago : (Abridged edition) - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

RRP $24.99

$21.75

13%
OFF
The Fine Cotton Fiasco - Peter Hoysted

RRP $34.99

$28.75

18%
OFF
The Siege : The Remarkable Story of the Greatest SAS Hostage Drama - Ben Macintyre
True Spirit : The Aussie girl who took on the world - Jessica Watson