You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
On the Move takes as its title that of a poem by Thom Gunn, the British poet and a friend of the author; the poem nicely captures Oliver Sacks's love of movement, men, and motorcycles. Indeed, the front of the book's dust jacket reveals Sacks as a fit young man, clad in leather, on his BMW R60 in 1961 in Greenwich Village. The motorcycle is one of several owned by Sacks from the age of eighteen, loved for the feeling of release from the “sense of imprisonment and powerlessness” (p. 3) he felt when sent away to a rural boarding school during the London Blitz.
Sacks begins the book with his love of motorcycles, and thus it is only fitting that I honor his choice in this review. The back of the dust jacket shows Sacks at Machu Picchu in 2006, sitting and writing in his journal. Between these two iconic images, the book reveals a remarkable life, one spent very much on the move, writing, riding, and of course working steadily in adulthood as a neurologist with a passion for clinical work and storytelling.
In his freewheeling narrative, Sacks offers what gerontologists call a life review—an associative recounting of a life, a method familiar to analysts. Perhaps Sacks's long immersion in analytic therapy with a then unknown young analyst, Leonard Shengold, may have contributed to his discursive writing.
A more conventional, linear account of a life than this book provides would begin with the author's upbringing in London, one of four sons of two Orthodox Jewish physicians. It was assumed in this family that the sons would go on to follow in the parents' footsteps; the two older brothers did so. Sacks did train as a physician. His younger brother, Michael, became psychotic and was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Sacks credits