I’ve read none of the books on which Oliver Sacks’s critical reputation rests (Awakenings, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for A Hat, and so on).  In fact, until now I had read only the posthumously published collection of essays he wrote about illness and dying called Gratitude (2015).

What I remember about Gratitude are the qualities that Sacks’s readers tend to remark upon: his sensitivity, tenderness, and limitless curiosity about what it means to be human.  All are found again in Everything In Its Place.  It’s otherwise something of a hotch-potch of a collection, combining a few very personal essays about things that influenced him in his early life (libraries, museums, and so on) with some clinically-centered pieces of the kind that made him famous.  All are written beautifully.  The explicitly autobiographical pieces are especially good, but it’s an essay in the middle of the collection called The Aging Brain that captured best for me what made Sacks such a deeply engaging writer and, I assume, such a wonderful doctor. The essay is a distillation of what he learned from a lifetime of treating patients with various types of dementia.  It’s not so much the clinical conclusions that matter here.  What sticks is his unshakeable belief in the dignity to be found in every human life, including those ravaged by cruel mental illnesses.