Gratitude by Oliver Sachs 45pp, £9.99 (£4.72 Kindle) Book review by Lawrence Youlten

Oliver Sachs died a few months ago, and this short book comprises four short essays on the themes of mortality and how to assess the contribution of one’s life to the world one is shortly to leave. I have long been a fan of Sachs’s books. He was born in 1933, so is one of my generation, and though we never met, we lived in the same area of North London in our formative years. He was a practising physician in New York until shortly before his death.  He is a wonderfully clear and entertaining writer. Probably his best-known books are “The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat” and “Awakenings”. The latter was made into an award-winning feature film starring Robin Williams and Robert de Niro. Both deal with his work as a neurologist, both as a clinician and a researcher. He has also written an entertaining memoir of his childhood as part of an observant Orthodox Jewish family, “Uncle Tungsten”, and recently a more comprehensive autobiography, “On the Move”.

“Gratitude” is a short book that can easily be read at one sitting, and, as I have already discovered, repays rereading. Of particular interest was his account of how an atheist who has turned his back on his strict religious upbringing makes sense of the world and his place in it. He deals with the sensitive subject of how he broke the news that he was gay to his parents. His mother’s reaction to this seems extraordinary from the perspective of time, but would, I think, have been quite usual in the 1950s. If you have ever wondered how you would cope with the fact of imminent death, you should find a lot of interest and reassurance in “Gratitude”