"Compulsively readable. . . . Dr. Sacks writes beautifully and with
exceptional subtlety and penetration into both the state of mind of his
patients and the nature of illness generally. . . . A brilliant and
humane book." -- A. Alvarez, The Observer Awakenings -- which inspired
the major motion picture -- is the remarkable story of a group of
patients who contracted sleeping-sickness during the great epidemic just
after World War I. Frozen for decades in a trance-like state, these men
and women were given up as hopeless until 1969, when Dr. Oliver Sacks
gave them the then-new drug L-DOPA, which had an astonishing, explosive,
"awakening" effect. Dr. Sacks recounts the moving case histories of his
patients, their lives, and the extraordinary transformations that went
with their reintroduction to a changed world. "[Sacks] opens to the
reader doors of perception generally passed through only by those at the
far borders of human experience." -- The Boston Globe "One of the most
beautifully composed and moving works of our time." -- The Washington
Post "A masterpiece." -- W. H. Auden
