LETTERS. DR. OLIVER SACKS 2024. LA SÉRIE NOIRE, LES RENCONTRES PHILOSOPHIQUES DE MONACO

The letters of one of the greatest observers of the human species, revealing his passion for life and work, friendship and art, medicine and society, and the richness of his relationships with friends, family, and fellow intellectuals over the decades, collected here for the first time.

“Oliver Sacks’s letters are superb—fluent, brilliant, candid, intimate—and some of them are deliriously passionate. Oliver could write a multi-page love letter as well as a lengthy analysis of a drug state or a neurological condition. Taken together, over more than fifty years, they constitute an autobiography in epistolary form.”

— Paul Theroux

Letters

Dr. Oliver Sacks—who describes himself in these pages as a “philosophical physician” and a “neuropathological Talmudist”—wrote letters throughout his life: to his parents and his beloved Auntie Len, to friends and colleagues from London, Oxford, California, and around the world. 

The letters begin with his arrival in America as a young man, eager to establish himself away from the confines of postwar England, and carry us through his bumpy early career in medicine and the discovery of his writer’s voice; his weight-lifting, motorcycle-riding years and his explosive seasons of discovery with the patients who populate his book Awakenings. 

His growing interest in matters of sight and the musical brain; his many friendships and exchanges with writers, artists, and scientists (to say nothing of astronauts, botanists, and mathematicians), and his deep gratitude for all these relationships at the end of his life.

Sensitively introduced and edited by Kate Edgar, Sacks’s longtime editor, the letters deliver a portrait of Sacks as he wrestles with the workings of the brain and mind. 

We see, through his eyes, the beginnings of modern neuroscience, following the thought processes of one of the great intellectuals of our time, whose words, as evidenced in these pages, were unfailingly shaped with generosity and wonder toward other people.

https://www.oliversacks.com/oliver-sacks-books/letters/

LES RENCONTRES PHILOSOPHIQUES DE MONACO

Le quatre-vingtième anniversaire de la « Série noire », fameuse collection criminelle publiée par les éditions Gallimard, offre l’occasion rêvée de revenir sur l’emprise d’un genre littéraire populaire qui a essaimé bien au-delà de ses frontières états-uniennes d’origine, très vite conquis le cinéma – avant les séries télévisées et la bande dessinée – et gagné des lettres de noblesse institutionnelles : personne ou presque n’oserait contester son statut de « grantécrivain » à un Raymond Chandler.   Frontières du noir, titre choisi en hommage à Eric Ambler, se propose d’explorer en priorité les domaines français, américain et britannique (avec tout de même une excursion japonaise) en privilégiant tout d’abord le pas de côté : Charles Dickens ou Francis Carco, Michael Curtiz ou François Truffaut, ces noms donnent quelque idée d’une approche volontiers périphérique. Le noir s’étend dès lors sans se diluer et permet de penser à nouveaux frais les enjeux d’une permanence d’un genre pensé comme un recours, plus inquiétant qu’apaisant, aux angoisses du temps.   Éditions de Minuit - ISBN : 9782707356598