by Oliver W. Sacks

One of the most beautifully composed and moving works of our time.'  --The Washington Post

'Compulsively readable. . . . Dr. Sacks writes beautifully and with exceptional subtlety and penetration into both the state of mind of his patients and the nature of illness generally. . . . A brilliant and humane book.'  --A. Alvarez, The Observer

Awakenings--which inspired the major motion picture--is the remarkable story of a group of patients who contracted sleeping-sickness during the great epidemic just after World War I. Frozen for decades in a trance-like state, these men and women were given up as hopeless until 1969, when Dr. Oliver Sacks gave them the then-new drug L-DOPA, which had an astonishing, explosive, 'awakening' effect. Dr. Sacks recounts the moving case histories of his patients, their lives, and the extraordinary transformations which went with their reintroduction to a changed world.

'[Sacks] opens to the reader doors of perception generally passed through only by those at the far borders of human experience.'        --The Boston Globe

'A masterpiece.'  --W. H. Auden