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"I know what the cow is feeling," Grandin, a realist, tells Sacks over a dinner of spare ribs. But while she has animal rapport, her neurological wiring bypasses most human emotions; the upheavals of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet leave her unmoved. The characters closest to her heart are Star Trek's android Data and his poignant predecessor, the supercognitive Mr. Spock.
With Grandin and other subjects, Sacks has refined the case history into an art form. As his friend and colleague New York City neuropsychologist Elkhonon Goldberg puts it, "Oliver has salvaged the uniqueness of patients from statistical averaging." Indeed, each essay seems like an extended house call from an old-fashioned family doctor. There is also Sacks' open, encompassing style that welcomes the reader into his esoteric world. "A neurologist's life is not systematic," he writes, "but it provides him with novel and unexpected situations, which can be windows, peepholes, into the intricacy of nature-an intricacy that one might not anticipate from the ordinary course of life."
Sacks' course has been anything but ordinary. He was born in 1933 into a London household of high achievement. Both parents practiced medicine and instilled in their four sons a reverence for the family vocation. Three grew up to be physicians. The child Oliver was stimulated by good food, emotional warmth and high-minded conversation.
This was significantly interrupted at the beginning of World War II when, at six, he was shipped to a country boarding school for safety. He escaped the Blitz but suffered bad cooking and unpredictable canings. Visits from his overworked parents were sporadic. Basic science proved more dependable: the behavior of hydrogen, boron and manganese was more consistent than that of his headmaster.
For a man who studies the brain, the most complex mechanism in the universe, fundamentals are still reassuring. "Generally I tend to like more primitive things," Sacks explains; "ferns more than flowering plants, invertebrates more than vertebrates, inorganic chemistry more than organic chemistry."
Not to mention elemental species like the Hell's Angels. After receiving degrees in physiology, biology and medicine from Oxford, Sacks headed to California in 1960 to study neurology and sample the wild life. He rode with the notorious bikers' club and lifted weights competitively. A 600-lb. hoist won him a state championship. Today he keeps in shape by swimming two hours a day. "It's like watching a porpoise," says his friend, New Yorker writer Lawrence Weschler. "He's incredibly powerful, incredibly graceful and incessant."
Sacks is a less impressive terrestrial. Whoever defined walking as a series of movements to keep from falling down could have had him in mind. His 1984 book A Leg to Stand On is a neurological account of his recovery from severe muscle and nerve damage suffered in a tumble during a 1976 hiking trip in Norway. After writing the book, he slipped and injured his other leg. It was awkwardness, however, that led to his becoming a clinician. In California, Sacks worked in a lab with disastrous results. He absentmindedly misplaced data and once accidentally dropped his lunch into a centrifuge. It was clear he wasn't suited for research.