Description

Well before Oliver Sacks turned a known specialist and best-selling author, he was a little English child intrigued by metals–also by chemical reactions (the higher and smellier the greater), images, squids and cuttlefish, H.G. Wells, and the occasional table. In this forever wonderful and elegant memoir, the writer of The Person Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Awakenings chronicles his love affair with technology and the wonderfully peculiar and occasionally traumatic childhood by which that love affair unfolded.In Dad Tungsten we fulfill Sacks’ remarkable family, from his physician mom (who presents the fourteen-year-old Oliver towards the artwork of human dissection) and his dad, a family physician who imbues in his child an earlier excitement for housecalls, to his “Uncle Tungsten,” whose manufacturer creates tungsten-filament lightbulbs. We follow the small Oliver as he's exiled in the age of six into a harsh, sadistic boarding-school to flee the London Blitz, and later as he sets about passionately reliving the intrusions of his chemical heroes–in view their own house lab.