Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood - Rilegato

Sacks, Oliver W.

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0375404481 ISBN 13: 9780375404481

Casa editrice: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2001

Riassunto

Long before Oliver Sacks became a distinguished neurologist and bestselling writer, he was a small English boy fascinated by metals-also by chemical reactions (the louder and smellier the better), photography, squids and cuttlefish, H.G. Wells, and the periodic table. In this endlessly charming and eloquent memoir, the author chronicles his love affair with science and the magnificently odd and sometimes harrowing childhood in which that love affair unfolded. In Uncle Tungsten we meet Sacks' extraordinary family, from his surgeon mother, who introduces the fourteen-year-old Oliver to the art of human dissection, and his father, a family doctor who imbues in his son an early enthusiasm for housecalls, to his "Uncle Tungsten," whose factory produces tungsten-filament light bulbs. We follow the young Oliver as he is exiled at the age of six to a grim, sadistic boarding school to escape the London Blitz, and later watch as he sets about passionately reliving the exploits of his chemical heroes, in his own home laboratory. Uncle Tungsten is a crystalline view of a brilliant young mind springing to life, a story of growing up which is by turns elegiac, comic, and wistful, full of the electrifying joy of discovery.A memoir of the scientific wonder of youth by the distinguished neurologist and author describes his fascination with metals, gasses, and chemicals, and with unravelling the complex mysteries of the world around him.

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Recensione:

"Dr.Sacks mourns, with a Wordsworthian sense of loss, the passing of those 'lyrical, mystical perceptions of childhood', those 'sudden landscapes of glory and illumination'. And yet the mixture of rekindled passion, humility and humour with which the older man pays homage to the boy, shows just how little he has faded into the light of common day."

-The Economist

"Good prose is often described as glowing: luminous, numinous, glimmering, shimmering, incandescent, radiant. Sacks's writing is all that, and sometimes, no matter how closely you read it, you can't quite figure out what makes it so precisely, unsparingly light...By the time he was 15...Sacks's attention began drifting away from
chemistry...He can't quite say why he abandoned his first love and Mendeleev's Garden. His 'intellectual limitations? Adolescence? School?...The inevitable course, the natural history, of enthusiasm, that burns hotly, brightly...and then, exhausting itself, gutters out?' No matter. With Uncle Tungsten, Sacks has reignited the fire, so the rest of us can read by its glow."

-The New York Times Book Review

"Artful, impassioned memoir of a youth spent lost in the blinding light of chemistry from neurologist/essayist Sacks. . . . . In a kind and gracious voice, Sacks guides readers on his journey of passionate discovery into the romance of chemistry. . . . The realm of science is alchemy in Sacks's hands as he spins pure gold from base metals."
-Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"In Uncle Tungsten, Oliver Sacks weaves together the wonders of chemistry and his boyhood experiences with grace, ease, and just the right comedic touch. The result is a rich, unique, and compelling glimpse into the development of an enormously fertile and creative mind."
-Brian Greene

"A gift from a wonderful man and a masterful scholar and writer. This sharing of life can only merit the chemist's symbol for Tungsten: W --a winner!" -Stephen Jay Gould

"Oliver Sacks is an extraordinary soul-scientist and artist, healer and explorer-and he has given us an extraordinary memoir. Uncle Tungsten is profoundly illuminating and continually surprising."
-James Gleick

L'autore:

Oliver Sacks is the author of Awakenings, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and many other books, for which he has received numerous awards, including the Hawthornden Prize, a Polk Award, and a Guggenheim fellowship. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and lives in New York City, where he is a practicing neurologist.

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• Editore: Alfred a Knopf Inc
• Data di pubblicazione: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0375404481
• ISBN 13: 9780375404481
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 337