Awakenings

I would recommend this book to my friends because it is an amazing voyage you are taken on through the professional eyes of Oliver Sacks. His descriptions are poetic and allow you to understand that disease is not uniform especially anything that effects the brain.

I loved the history of each patient and how the past of each person interacts with the L-DOPA given to each patient. Truly amazing in its artistic quality.

Oliver Sacks is quirky and his introduction is almost parallel to Robin Williams in the movie version of the book. Jonathan Davis is truly amazing in his connection to the subject. With Jonathan Davis as a narrator to some of the most amazing and saddening events in peoples lives there is a pathos that is undeniable and will tug at you in the most elemental or human ways.

When one of the patients started to have hallucinations of a visitor to her room. She would start to get prepared for company and await her late night gentleman caller. It is amazing to hear just what human beings are capable of.

Amazing! Read the book. Watch the movie. Watch the documentary. Rethink what makes you...you.

Sachs does a marvelous job of taking one through the science of "sleepy sickness" and then immersing one in the lives of the poor souls affected by it. We see their "rebirth" into life and how some came to chose the return to total immobility once more. Like so much of Sachs' work, this is a strange and wondrous portrayal of neurology and this bizarre and glorious experience we call human life. (If you saw the movie years ago... be prepared for a rather long--but necessary primer on the science of the illness in the beginning of the book. It is not a novelization. It is first and foremost a science book.)

My husband wanted me to get this for him. We had seen the movie and loved it. He had read other books by Oliver Sacks and enjoyed each one. This did not disappoint....loved every minute of it and the narration was terrific as well. To inject the personalties of the patients aided in understanding the different problems that each one had before going to "sleep" and after they awakened was very interesting, sometimes sad, sometimes funny - just wonderful. The patients themselves were often humorous and knowing the difficulties they faced enlightened the situation. My husband, being a Parkinson's patient, could relate to some of the difficulties of the disease.
THIS IS HIGHLY RECOMMENDED TO OTHERS!

I read a fair amount of deep, challenging nonfiction books but this one was EXACTLY like reading a paper published in a medical journal that is aimed only at fellow doctors/scientists in the field. The narrator does an amazing job with all of the highly technical medical and pharmacological words but it destroys any sense of reading enjoyment. I can't imagine this was really meant for the general public.

could not get in to this. I thought It was going to be a story but instead it is a cinical review of 15 patients; one by one. gets boring.