Everything in Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales

From the bestselling author of On Gratitude, On the Move and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. In this spirited volume, neurologist Oliver Sacks examines the many passions of his own life – both as a doctor engaged with the central questions of human existence, and as a polymath conversant in all the sciences. Why do humans need gardens? How, and when, does a physician tell his patient she has Alzheimer’s? What is social media doing to our brains? In several of the compassionate case histories collected here, Sacks considers for the first time the enigmas of depression, psychosis and schizophrenia, and in others he returns to conditions that have long fascinated him: Tourette’s syndrome, ageing, dementia and hallucinations. In counterpoint to these elegant investigations of what makes us human, this volume also includes pieces that celebrate Sacks’s love of the natural world – and his last meditations on life in the twenty-first century. Everything in Its Place gives us an intimate portrait of a master writer and thinker at work. ‘Life bursts through all of Oliver Sacks’s writing. He was and will remain a brilliant singularity’ – The New York Times Book Review Now part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the very best of modern literature.