Tag Archives: investigation

The Monday Book – On the Move: A Life by Oliver Sacks

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Guest review by Janelle Bailey, avid reader and always learning; sometimes substitute teaching, sometimes grandbabysitting, sometimes selling books

On the Move: A Life by Oliver Sacks

I actually listened to this one rather than reading the print version, BUT there were so many things I wanted to go back to in reference that I have since starting it purchased the printed edition as well.

Eventually I will read everything Oliver Sacks ever wrote prior to his passing, in August of 2015. By my own estimation, I am maybe 1/6 to 1/5 of the way in so far. My entry to Oliver Sacks was, like many, watching the movie Awakenings, which was based on his book by the same title. Having no idea who Oliver Sacks was and/or how he was involved with that project, I was with his very brief and relevant collection of thnext introduced to his writing via one of his short–three essays, I believe–collections called Gratitude. And ever since then I have been quite fascinated by Sacks’s stories, his brain, his storytelling–really by everything, seemingly, that makes Oliver Sacks, well…Oliver Sacks, and I wish to know and understand it all. His is a fascinating story and for so many layers of reason.

Sacks is smart and funny, thoughtful and sometimes artistically selfish, but engagedly entertaining; everything that I have read of his has given me some new perspectives on life, added interesting new layers of consideration for my own, made me think about something or some things differently from how I previously had. And if I ever do seek the attention of a psychologist, I plan to ask whether he/she/they have read Sacks. I think that’d be my standard for the smartest among them. He’s a scientist, a medical professional, a doctor–and yet he tends to people and their concerns in a patient and thoughtfully thorough way, having pondered so many situations and collected so many interesting cases over time.

In On the Move, one of his final literary projects, we read more of a memoir of Sacks’s earlier life and experiences as well as his most recent, both his initiation into romance and relationships along with fairly solid distate for it all, his coming out as a homosexual, and then as only occurred many years later, his finding true love at 77 and building a relationship with Bill Hayes. And learning about him prompted me to add his own Insomniac City to my tbr list as well.

Additionally we learn about Sacks’s relationship with his very successful and similarly smart parents, both doctors as well, and each of them passing away before him. On the Move is also about Sacks’s move from the UK to the US, and here he also explains his preference to remain an “alien” over pursuing US citizenship.

Sacks has lots to say and is a great teacher of life.

On the Move: A Life is a great read. Just like a woman who came into the bookstore recently looking for a book by Sacks and sharing why she similarly admires him, I, too, am (and already!) reading Sacks’s Musicophilia next. May I just say how much it pleased me to have someone asking for Oliver Sacks books? She explained that as a retired AP Psychology teacher, she was on a mission to read everything he had ever written. Me, too, Ms. __…me, too!

The Monday Book – Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

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Guest review by Janelle Bailey, avid reader/ever-an-educator/lifelong learner…and also now 7th grade ELA teacher and part-time bookseller

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

My path to and through this book is quite interesting. I learned, while on a brief trip to San Diego this spring, that Steve Jobs’s birthmother was from my hometown of Green Bay, Wisconsin. And then I also learned that novelist Mona Simpson is his full sister. I had never heard either of these stories and found both quite compelling and interesting, especially given what I thought I knew about Steve Jobs.

This prompted me to read–well, mostly listen to–the lengthy (25 hours!) audiobook that shares its title with its subject–both called Steve Jobs–as well as reference the print copy sent by my cousin.

Boy, there was a LOT about Steve Jobs that I’d never heard before this. I had no idea how eccentric he most often was, how stringent his dietary practices, and/or how difficult it was to work with/for him at times. It made me think a lot about Emerson’s essay, Self-Reliance, and how Jobs seems to be another, possibly who fits a bit into the “To be great is to be misunderstood camp. Emerson wrote: “Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”

And yet there may be many who don’t feel Jobs fits here, maybe that he’s “not that great,” merely “misunderstood.” He definitely had some interesting practices–like his fruitarian diet, or eating enough carrots that his skin turned orange. He had to have some pretty important people confront him about his own hygiene as well.

To hear (read), though, of his many ideas and innovations that reached fruition as iphones and ipods and itunes, etc. was quite impressive. And I don’t know that I was able to track all of that history as it was happening; hearing it all laid out this way, though, was very interesting.

And to learn all the details of his parents’ decision to put him up for adoption and then learn of his ultimately meeting his mother and sister in his late 20s/early 30s was all quite interesting as well.

I say read it if you’ve ever at all been a Steve Jobs fan or been skeptical about him. I feel much more in the know after this than I did before, and that’s certain. I’ll tell anyone who’ll listen about Jobs’s Green Bay origins.