The first of my reviews from Shiny New Books that I’ll be pointing you towards is… a little book called Gratitude by Oliver Sacks, and the final book that will ever be published under his name. Read the whole review here, or be enticed by the opening of it…
I’ve had the privilege of reviewing three different books by Oliver Sacks for Shiny New Books now, but this is the first since his sad death last year. By the time his autobiography On The Move was published, we already knew that Sacks had fatal cancer – though he didn’t know it when the manuscript was handed in. So the difference between his autobiography and three of the four essays here is precisely that: these are written with an awareness of mortality and this, indeed, is often their theme.