A deeply moving testimony and celebration of how to embrace life. No writer has succeeded in capturing the medical and human drama of illness as honestly and as eloquently as Oliver Sacks. During the last few months of his life, he wrote a set of essays in which he movingly explored his feelings about completing a life and coming to terms with his own death. “A series of heart-rending yet ultimately uplifting essays….A lasting gift to readers." — The Washington Post “It is the fate of every human being,” Sacks writes, “to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.” Together, these four essays form an ode to the uniqueness of each human being and to gratitude for the gift of life. “My predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved. I have been given much and I have given something in return. Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.” —Oliver Sacks “Oliver Sacks was like no other clinician, or writer. He was drawn to the homes of the sick, the institutions of the most frail and disabled, the company of the unusual and the ‘abnormal.’ He wanted to see humanity in its many variants and to do so in his own, almost anachronistic way—face to face, over time, away from our burgeoning apparatus of computers and algorithms. And, through his writing, he showed us what he saw.” —Atul Gawande, author of Being Mortal

Recommended on 1 episode:

Tim Ferriss on suffering, psychedelics, and spirituality

Books recommended:

• 📕  Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
• 📘  The Way of the Superior Man: A Spiritual Guide to Mastering the Challenges of Women, Work, and Sexual Desire (20th Anniversary Edition) by David Deida
• 📗  Words That Work: It's Not What You Say, It's What People Hear by Dr. Frank Luntz
• 📙  The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done (Harperbusiness Essentials) by Peter F. Drucker
• 📕  Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging by Sebastian Junger
• 📘  Gratitude by Oliver Sacks
• 📗  When Less Becomes More: Making Space for Slow, Simple, and Good by Emily Ley
• 📙  Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott
• 📕  Dune (Dune Chronicles, Book 1) by Frank Herbert
• 📘  The Magic of Thinking Big by David J. Schwartz
• 📗  Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis, Peter Bien
• 📙  The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance by Josh Waitzkin

March 2, 2017 12 books recommended

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