A Leg to Stand On

‘Sacks has written a book about a leg, his leg; but it is a story about the nature of selfhood – a narrative comparable to Conrad’s The Secret Sharer’ New York Review of Books ‘Losing the use of a limb is a catastrophe, and it needed a thoughtful essay written about it. This is it. It is more than that. Oliver Sacks is a neurologist of wide lay reading, a man of humane eloquence, a genuine communicator aware of the damnable rift that subsists between doctor and patient. Its value lies in its willingness to combine the technical and the demonic, to admit poetry and philosophy and the religious impulse. It is also intensely personal, but it affirms the community of human experience’ Anthony Burgess, Observer’It is in every way a marvellously rich and thoughtful tale. Dr Sacks has, once again, emphatically shown how much there is still to be learned from painstakingly observed and chronicled case history’ Sunday Telegraph’Dr Sacks reviews his predicament in exact clinical, emotional and philosophical terms. No one has described that famous condition so well before. A remarkable, generous, vivid and thoroughly intelligent piece of writing’ Sunday Times