Oliver Sacks has been dead for more than three years. In August 2015, the British neurologist and author succumbed to metastatic cancer, which had started nine years earlier as uveal melanoma, seemingly vanquished at the cost of sight in his right eye. But his vision lives on. In Everything in Its Place, a collection of his essays, Sacks details the joy and despair he experienced in his 82 years of living.
Among popularizers of science, Sacks has always stood out as particularly adept at imbuing his writing with blood, life, and history. His agility with the microscope of prose—zooming in on acute scenes from his own life, then back out to encapsulate life and science as a whole—is in full flourish in his latest book, to be published later this month. For example, in the essay “Humphry Davy: Poet of Chemistry,” he precisely details his boyhood fascination with the renowned ...
