Product Description

From his earliest days, Oliver Sacks, the distinguished neurologist who is also one of the most remarkable storytellers of our time, was irresistibly drawn to understanding the natural world. Born into a large family of doctors, metallurgists, chemists, physicists, and teachers, his curiosity was encouraged and abetted by aunts, uncles, parents, and older brothers. But soon after his sixth birthday, the Second World War broke out and he was evacuated from London, as were hundreds of thousands of children, to escape the bombing. Exiled to a school that rivaled Dickens's grimmest, fed on a steady diet of turnips and beetroots, tormented by a sadistic headmaster, and allowed home only once in four years, he felt desolate and abandoned.

When he returned to London in 1943 at the age of ten, he was a changed, withdrawn boy, one who desperately needed order to make sense of his life. He was sustained by his secret passions: for numbers, for metals, and for finding patterns in the world around him. Under the tutelage of his "chemical" uncle, Uncle Tungsten, Sacks began to experiment with "the stinks and bangs" that almost define a first entry into chemistry: tossing sodium off a bridge to see it take fire in the water below; producing billowing clouds of noxious-smelling chemicals in his home lab. As his interests spread to investigations of batteries and bulbs, vacuum tubes and photography, he discovered his first great scientific heroes, men and women whose genius lay in understanding the hidden order of things and disclosing the forces that sustain and support the tangible world. There was Humphry Davy, the boyish chemist who delighted in sending flaming globules of metal shooting across his lab; Marie Curie, whose heroic efforts in isolating radium would ultimately lead to the unlocking of the secrets of the atom; and Dmitri Mendeleev, inventor of the periodic table, whose pursuit of the classification of elements unfolds like a detective story.

Uncle Tungsten vividly evokes a time when virtual reality had not yet displaced a hands-on knowledge of the world. It draws us into a journey of discovery that reveals, through the enchantment and wonder of a childhood passion, the birth of an extraordinary and original mind.


From the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #60435 in Books
• Published on: 2002-09-17
• Released on: 2002-09-17
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

From Amazon.com
Oliver Sacks's luminous memoir charts the growth of a mind. Born in 1933 into a family of formidably intelligent London Jews, he discovered the wonders of the physical sciences early from his parents and their flock of brilliant siblings, most notably "Uncle Tungsten" (real name, Dave), who "manufactured lightbulbs with filaments of fine tungsten wire." Metals were the substances that first attracted young Oliver, and his descriptions of their colors, textures, and properties are as sensuous and romantic as an art lover's rhapsodies over an Old Master. Seamlessly interwoven with his personal recollections is a masterful survey of scientific history, with emphasis on the great chemists like Robert Boyle, Antoine Lavoisier, and Humphry Davy (Sacks's personal hero). Yet this is not a dry intellectual autobiography; his parents in particular, both doctors, are vividly sketched. His sociable father loved house calls and "was drawn to medicine because its practice was central in human society," while his shy mother "had an intense feeling for structure ... for her [medicine] was part of natural history and biology." For young Oliver, unhappy at the brutal boarding school he was sent to during the war, and afraid that he would become mentally ill like his older brother, chemistry was a refuge in an uncertain world. He would outgrow his passion for metals and become a neurologist, but as readers of Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat know, he would never leave behind his conviction that science is a profoundly human endeavor. --Wendy Smith

Books in Canada
Oliver Sacks has certainly reached the point in his career where it would make sense to write a memoir. Hailed worldwide as a path-breaking neurologist, he's had a parallel career as a best-selling author; he's even been played by Robin Williams (who starred in the 1990 adaptation of his 1982 book Awakenings). But his newest book, Uncle Tungsten: Memoirs of a Chemical Boyhood, is a very eccentric autobiography. It covers a relatively short part of his life, and doesn't deal at all with the scientific pursuit that actually made him famous, neurology. Indeed, when he finally does get around to talking about how he became a doctor, the narrative takes a bittersweet, almost sad turn. "It was 'understood,' by the time I was fourteen, that I was going to be a doctor; my parents were doctors, my brothers in medical school," he writes, in the book's last few pages. "My parents had been tolerant, even pleased, with my early interests in science, but now, they seemed to feel, the time for play was over" (p309).

The "play" that Sacks is referring to is chemistry, which was for him an all-consuming, utterly adolescent passion that reminds me very much indeed of the "secret vice" of dead or artificial languages that J.R.R. Tolkien and his admirers speak of in such giddy tones. "I wanted to be a chemist," Sacks writes. "A chemist like [Carl Wilhelm] Scheele, an eighteenth-century chemist coming fresh to the field, looking at the whole undiscovered world of natural substances and minerals, analyzing them, plumbing their secrets, and finding the wonder of unknown and new metals" (p45). His various experimental and literary adventures (and one of the pleasures of this book for the non-scientist is learning about all sorts of scientific writing) in chemistry are what constitute the meat of Uncle Tungsten.

This is not to say that we don't learn anything about his family life, or of history; indeed, for Sacks, the pursuit of chemistry is all wound up with familial relationships and the odd little details of antiquated material culture. The book is named for his Uncle Dave, whom he came to call Uncle Tungsten because he was in the lightbulb business. "He had several glass-fronted cabinets in his office, one of which contained a series of electric lightbulbs," Sacks recalls. "There were several Edison bulbs from the early 1880s, with filaments of carbonized thread; a bulb from 1897, with a filament of osmium; and several bulbs from the turn of the century, with spidery filaments of tantalum tracing a zigzag course inside them. Then there were the more recent bulbs-these were Uncle's special pride and interest, for some of them he had pioneered himself-with tungsten filaments of all shapes and sizes" (pp34-5). This strikes me as quite a typical passage because of the way that it renders odd little details (glass-fronted cabinets, differing kinds of filament) in very clear, almost bland prose which somehow ends up tinged with gently melancholic nostalgia.

For Sacks is no stylist, at least not in this book; his writing is clear but sometimes so modest and weighed down with detail as to feel a little naive. After being lost among some snowdrifts during his wartime boarding-school days, he recalls, "I was very happy to be found, finally, and hugged and given a mug of hot chocolate when I got back to school" (p21). A bit later, he turns towards the historical: "Edison experimented with many other metals with higher melting points to get a workable filament, but none proved suitable. Then in 1879 he had a brainwave" (p49). There's nothing really wrong with bits like these, they just feel awkward, not-quite-cooked in a way that readers of memoirs by far less distinguished writers than Sacks will no doubt recognise. Still, there are benefits to this restraint, this lack of adornment. Recalling his first engagement with Marie Curie's writing, he recalls that "I loved the minute descriptions of the elaborate chemical processes the Curies performed, the careful, systematic examination of radium's properties, and especially the sense of intellectual excitement and wonder that seemed to simmer beneath the even-toned scientific prose" (p260). It's hardly surprising that Sacks zeroes in on this aspect of Curie's work, because it's exactly what he is doing throughout Uncle Tungsten. His prose is certainly even-toned and his descriptions of various scientific concepts and processes are often meticulous, but all this calmness always hints at (or sometimes just fails to fully convey) an ever-present sense of glee, of astonishment at the sheer vastness of the natural sciences.

Sacks' use of language is ironic, though, in light of his admiration for the scientist-poets of the 18th and 19th centuries. In a chapter called "Humphrey Davy: A Poet-Chemist", he writes that "[t]here still existed, in the early nineteenth century, a union of literary and scientific cultures-there was not the dissociation of sensibility that was soon to come-and Davy's period at Bristol saw the start of a close friendship with Coleridge and the Romantic poets" (p126). This is not exactly C.P. Snow, but running throughout Uncle Tungsten is a pronounced desire to join the scientific method with a poetic view of the world. Rationalism, clarity, the search for genuinely new knowledge: these are the ideals that animate his story of a precocious adolescent, and these ideals certainly have equal amounts in common with the best impulses driving both the humanities and the sciences.

And for Sacks, the ultimate realisation of these ideals is the Periodic Table of the Elements. Marvelling at the way that Mendeleev's first Table seemed to bring order to the seemingly infinite, he writes that "[t]o have perceived an overall organization, a superarching principle uniting and relating all the elements, had a quality of the miraculous, of genius. And this gave me, for the first time, a sense of the transcendent power of the human mind, and the fact that it might be equipped to discover or decipher the deepest secrets of nature, to read the mind of God" (p191). Spread across the next two pages is the complete Table, whose history and darker corners he spends the rest of the chapter exploring. This is the part of the book where Sacks' adolescent relationship to chemistry comes out most clearly, and this isn't a bad thing. The Table for him contains all the big answers, the key that will unlock everything. He writes: "I was convinced that the periodic table was neither arbitrary nor superficial, but a representation of truths which would never be overturned, but would, on the contrary, continually be confirmed, show new depths with new knowledge, because it was as deep and simple as nature itself. And the perception of this produced in my twelve-year-old self a sort of ecstasy, the sense (in Einstein's words) that 'a corner of the great veil had been lifted.'" The Table becomes an odd combination of a perfect playmate and a perfect parent: infinitely wise, and infinitely interesting.

Sacks also tells us about a number of moments of sheer madness. Like the section about the Periodic Table, these passages have a sensibility that is uniquely adolescent. One deeply strange section recalls how his mother, an OB/Gyn, "would occasionally bring back malformed fetuses to the house-anencephalic ones with protruding eyes at the top of their brainless, flattened heads, or spina bifida ones in which the whole spinal cord was exposed. Some of these had been still-born, others she and the matron had quietly drowned at birth ('like a kitten,' she once said), feeling that if they had lived, no conscious or mental life would ever be possible. Eager that I should learn about anatomy and medicine, she dissected several of these for me, and then insisted, though I was only eleven, that I dissect them myself. She never perceived, I think, how distressed I became, and probably imagined that I was as enthusiastic here as she was" (pp240-41). I see Sacks trying to gain some adult distance from this experience here (you can almost hear him think "man, that was odd, wasn't it?"), but if he had really moved beyond his unformed, childish feelings about (really quite insane) experiences like dissecting deformed foetuses or the (deeply troubling) morality of his mother's drowning babies with birth defects, I think he'd have a hard time recounting all this with such apparent calm.

Finally, it is this kind of open, semi-naive calmness that lies at the heart of a great deal of scientific or aesthetic activity, and I think that it has something to offer an engaged reader. Oliver Sacks is not a master wordsmith, but he is blessed with a great memory and a willingness to state plainly what happened and let its significance filter through slowly. For as distinguished a scientist to go into such detail about a point in his life when he's still so unformed intellectually strikes me as an unusual and potentially self-serving exercise (ah, I was so bright and precocious as a lad, etc.). It comes off, however, as a rich meditation on the emergence of an enlightened mind. Jerry White (Books in Canada)

From Publishers Weekly
Sacks, a neurologist perhaps best known for his books Awakenings (which became a Robin Williams/Robert De Niro vehicle) and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, invokes his childhood in wartime England and his early scientific fascination with light, matter and energy as a mystic might invoke the transformative symbolism of metals and salts. The "Uncle Tungsten" of the book's title is Sacks's Uncle Dave, who manufactured light bulbs with filaments of fine tungsten wire, and who first initiated Sacks into the mysteries of metals. The author of this illuminating and poignant memoir describes his four tortuous years at boarding school during the war, where he was sent to escape the bombings, and his profound inquisitiveness cultivated by living in a household steeped in learning, religion and politics (both his parents were doctors and his aunts were ardent Zionists). But as Sacks writes, the family influence extended well beyond the home, to include the groundbreaking chemists and physicists whom he describes as "honorary ancestors, people to whom, in fantasy, I had a sort of connection." Family life exacted another transformative influence as well: his older brother Michael's psychosis made him feel that "a magical and malignant world was closing in about him," perhaps giving a hint of what led the author to explore the depths of psychosis in his later professional life. For Sacks, the onset of puberty coincided with his discovery of biology, his departure from his childhood love of chemistry and, at age 14, a new understanding that he would become a doctor. Many readers and patients are happy with that decision. (Oct.)Forecast: This book is as well-written as Sacks's earlier works, and should get fans engrossed in the facts of his life and opinions. Look for an early spike on the strength of his name, and strong sales thereafter.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

An incredible window into Oliver Sack's childhood...
Sacks is one of my favorite writers (with the exception of when he writes about ferns rather than people), but I think this is my favorite of all his books, even though it is in some spots uneven. Sacks intertwines his growing interest in chemistry (complete with the fascinating bit-of-science anecdotes that are typical of his work) with the story of his youth in London up to the War.

It must have been both a blessing and a curse to grow up in such a family. Such a blessing to have parents that support and revere Sacks' mad-scientist chemistry experiments: when he came close to blowing up the house rather than forbid him to play with such chemicals they bought him a ventilation hood for his 'lab').

But something dark also runs through his story--his parents' strange detachment (his mother had him witness autopsies, if I recall correctly) and his brother's developing schizophrenia.

The total effect of all this is that the tone of the story sways from impersonal "here's how such-and-such a chemical makes such-and-such a compound" to a warm evocation of his intellectual and eccentric uncles (his darling Uncle Tungsten), to some of the stranger personal events that stop you short (his brother).

In the end I completely forgave Sacks his wandering, because the book seems to replicate precisely how Sacks' mind actually works--one moment completely involved with people, one moment completely involved with science, one moment combining the two in a marvelous combustion that is a hybrid of chemistry and literature.

Some day I want to have him to dinner and hear the rest of the story. What a guest he would make!

infectious
I will preface this review by saying I am not a scientifically literate person. My educational background is in English and Philosohpy. So I cannot pass judgement on the science, a lot of which was above me (or, should I say, a foggy memory from confused high school days). In any event, what struck me about this book is the passion Mr. Sacks demonstrates for the subject act hand--whether that subject be mixing chemicals together or recalling one of his many aunts and uncles or his immediate family. One rarely encounters prose writers whose passion for their family and their work is so infectious.

The dean of element enthusiasts!
A beautiful, beautiful book! In a wonderful amalgam, Oliver Sacks has combined reminisces of his life in war-torn London, with his unfolding education as a scientist, with a history of the chemical elements. Throughout the book the Sacks family appears as kinds of modern-day Bernoullies, chock-full of chemists and doctors. It is not surprising that Oliver grows up as a physician cum chemist. The book will appeal to anyone interested in 1) WW II London, 2) family dynamics, 3) the occurrence and nature of talents in families, and 4) the education of a budding scientist, his adventures -- and misadventures -- along the way.

But the book has appeal to yet another kind of reader. Let me explain.
About two years ago, I wrote a review of Greenwood's "Chemistry of the Elements." I was surprised at the interest the review elicited, and I received some contacts from readers. It appears there are substantial numbers of "element enthusiasts" - people who generally are not professional chemists, but who have an enduring fascination with the chemical elements.
Through publication of his book, "Uncle Tungsten," Oliver Sacks has unquestionably advanced himself as the dean of element enthusiasts! The seamless transitions between Auntie Birdie, to Uncle Tungsten, to Curium and Einsteinium bespeak of a union with the chemical elements that is awesome.
The uncial-like etchings that introduce each chapter add a graceful touch. Not only are they decorative but they truly capture the mood of each chapter.