"The author Lawrence Weschler began spending time with Oliver Sacks in the early 1980s, when he set out to profile the neurologist for his own new employer, The New Yorker. Almost a decade earlier, Dr. Sacks had published his masterpiece Awakenings--the account of his long-dormant patients' miraculous but troubling return to life in a Bronx hospital ward. But the book had hardly been an immediate success, and the rumpled clinician was still largely unknown. Over the ensuing four years, the two men worked closely together until, for wracking personal reasons, Sacks asked Weschler to abandon the profile, a request to which Weschler acceded. The two remained close friends, however, across the next thirty years and then, just as Sacks was dying, he urged Weschler to take up the project once again. This book is the result of that entreaty. Weschler sets Sacks's brilliant table talk and extravagant personality in vivid relief, casting himself as a beanpole Sancho to Sacks's capacious Quixote. We see Sacks rowing and ranting and caring deeply; composing the essays that would form The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat; recalling his turbulent drug-fueled younger days; helping his patients and exhausting his friends; and waging intellectual war against a medical and scientific establishment that failed to address his greatest concern: the spontaneous specificity of the individual human soul. And all the while he is pouring out a stream of glorious, ribald, hilarious, and often profound conversation that establishes him as one of the great talkers of the age. Here is the definitive portrait of Sacks as our preeminent romantic scientist, a self-described "clinical ontologist" whose entire practice revolved around the single fundamental question he effectively asked each of his patients: How are you? Which is to say, How do you be? A question which Weschler, with this book, turns back on the good doctor himself."--Amazon.com.

Prologue -- Part I: Getting to know him / 1. Going for a row -- 2. Early childhood, a harrowing exile, cruel Judaism, homosexuality, and a mother's curse -- 3. Conversations with Bob Rodman and Thom Gunn in California -- 4. A visit to the American Museum of Natural History in New York and lunch at a Japanese restaurant -- 5. Oliver's cousins Abba Eban and Carmel Ross -- 6. From California to New York (1962-1967) -- 7. The migraine clinic (1966-1968) -- 8. The Awakenings drama (1968-1976) -- 9. On rounds with Oliver at Beth Abraham -- 10. Auden and Luria -- 11. A visit with Oliver to London, including conversations wtih Eric Korn, Joanthan Miller, and Colin Haycraft -- 12. On rounds with Oliver at the little sisters and Bronx State -- 13. Ward 23 -- 13. John the touretter -- Part II: How he was (the massing months) / 15. The blockage begins to break (1982-1983) -- 16. The leg book shambles toward publication as Oliver hazards a neurology of the soul (the first half of 1984) -- 17. The publication, at long last, of the leg book; its reception; Sancho launches into his profile and is stopped (the second half of 1984) -- Part III: Afterwards / 18. Dear friends (1985-2005) -- 19. A digression on the question of reliability and the nature of romantic science -- 20. His own life (2005-2015) -- Postscript -- Acknowledgments -- Index.