Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood
by Oliver Sacks
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Book Summary Information
Author: Oliver SacksEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2002-09-17
ISBN: 0375704043
Number of pages: 352
Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood
Book Review: One of the most outstanding human beings in the world
Summary: 5 Stars
There are people who by their actions make you ashamed of being human. There are others who by their actions make you on the one hand feel humble and small beside them, but on the other fill you with gratitude that Mankind has such models of greatness. Oliver Sacks in his tremendously powerful intellect, in his passion for knowledge and scientific inquiry, in his human compassion, and in his remarkable writing ability is I think one of the most outstanding human beings on this planet today. His memoir of his childhood years ( from six to fifteen) in London is a celebration of information and insight at once. As a child he is filled with a curiosity about the natural world, and especially about the world of chemisty, and even more especially about 'metals'. He comes from a remarkable extended family filled with interesting characters many of whom have scientific and medical interests. His parents, both of whom are doctors encourage him to inquire and investigate. And he does this and writes of these investigations with a remarkable sensitivity and feeling. It is as if the metals he is investigating, and the experiments he is doing have a kind of sensual life. As a writer Sacks is remarkable in being both scientifically precise and moving in his depiction of human emotions. One center of this work is his relation with his Uncle Tungsten who has a light- bulb factory and who is always investigating new ways of improving the product. Sacks as a youngster is eager to learn, and his uncle takes great pleasure and has great patience in teaching him. But the youngster also learns from others in fact it seems from everyone he meets including his remarkable parents. There an emphasis on the diversity and richness of worlds of learning the family is involved in. But the story is not one of simple one-sided happiness. During the war the six year old Sacks is sent away from the London of the Blitz to a boarding school where he is beaten and tormented. A lonely abused child he later is sent to still another school where he is isolated by his Jewishness. Perhaps these experiences have something to do with the great compassion he will display in his adult career as neurologist, his tremendous capacity to empathize with and understand people, and situations unique and extraordinary. In this memoir the focus is on his learning in the world of chemisty, and there are even sections where he reeducates himself and the reader by considering the work of the great pioneers of this area, including his hero, Sir Humphrey Davy. There is brilliance on each and every page of this work. And as Sacks himself is such an original mind, and such a great writer there is endless delight for the reader here. One small anecdote sticks in my mind. Sacks had an aunt who loved numbers and taught him a lot about how to play with them in his mind. She helped make him understand how mathematics could be a key to reading the physical universe. Sacks then goes on to wonder whether perhaps the mind of God works in numbers. An odd quirky thought but typical of the kind of suggestive insight this work is rich in.
Sacks accompanied his father on house visits , and saw his mother receiving patients all the time. The compassion and care he shows for those he writes about perhaps have their roots here.
Sacks writes often with a surprising humor. He does this in one long section on the family's religious life and his attitude towards it. He found the High Holidays and the Synagogue difficult but had a love for the religious life at home especially on Passover. He writes about the diverse attitudes of family members to various aspects of religion.
Another important element of the work is his discussion of migraines, a condition he shared with his mother. This certainly had something to do with his later becoming a neurologist. He writes humorously of hoping and waiting for a migraine attack so that he could study and examine the new phenomena it would present to him.
In all aspects of life he reveals a great curiosity and human interest. Even when he mocks at something he does so with a kind of gentleness and moderation. A sound sensible and sympathetic spirit.
This is a wonderful book by a very great human being.
Summary of Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood
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 of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Awakenings 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 lightbulbs. 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.
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
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