Amazon.com has Oliver Sacks giving a guest review for The Age of Wonder, which makes me want to read it.
I am a Richard Holmes addict. He is an incomparable biographer, but in The Age of Wonder, he rises to new heights and becomes the biographer not of a single figure, but of an entire unique period, when artist and scientist could share common aims and ambitions and a common language--and together create a "romantic," humanist science. We are once again on the brink of such an age, when science and art will come together in new and powerful ways. For this we could have no better model than the lives of William and Caroline Herschel and Humphry Davy, whose dedication and scientific inventiveness were combined with a deep sense of wonder and poetry in the universe. Only Holmes, who is so deeply versed in the people and culture of eighteenth-century science, could tell their story with such verve and resonance for our own time.
I love Oliver Sacks's books too. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and lives in New York City, where he is a practicing neurologist.
Good Oliver Sacks Reads
- The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales
- Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, Revised and Expanded Edition
- Migraine
An Anthropologist On Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales
- Awakenings
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