From his earliest days, Oliver Sacks—the distinguished neurologist who is also one of the most remarkable storytellers of our time—was irresistibly drawn to understanding the natural world. Born into a large family of doctors, metallurgists, chemists, physicists, and teachers, his curiosity was encouraged and abetted by aunts, uncles, parents, and older brothers. But soon after his sixth birthday, the Second World War broke out and he was evacuated from London—as were hundreds of thousands of children—to escape the bombing. Exiled to a school that rivaled Dickens's grimmest, fed on a steady diet of turnips and beetroots, tormented by a sadistic headmaster, and allowed home only once in four years, he felt desolate and abandoned.

When he returned to London in 1943 at the age of ten, he was a changed, withdrawn boy, one who desperately needed order to make sense of his life. He was sustained by his secret passions: for numbers, for metals, and for finding patterns in the world around him. Under the tutelage of his "chemical" uncle, Uncle Tungsten, Sacks began to experiment with "the stinks and bangs that almost define a first entry into chemistry": tossing sodium off a bridge to see it take fire in the water below; producing billowing clouds of noxious-smelling chemicals in his home lab. As his interests spread to investigations of batteries and bulbs, vacuum tubes and photography, he discovered his first great scientific heroes—men and women whose genius lay in understanding the hidden order of things and disclosing the forces that sustain and support the tangible world. There was Humphry Davy, the boyish chemist who delighted in sending flaming globules of metal shooting across his lab; Marie Curie, whose heroic efforts in isolating radium would ultimately lead to the unlocking of the secrets of the atom; and Dmitri Mendeleev, inventor of the periodic table, whose pursuit of the classification of elements unfolds like a detective story.

Uncle Tungsten vividly evokes a time when virtual reality had not yet displaced a hands-on knowledge of the world. It draws us into a journey of discovery that reveals, through the enchantment and wonder of a childhood passion, the birth of an extraordinary and original mind.

In Uncle Tungsten, Sacks carries this project into new and more personal territory. It is an unusual book, for it combines autobiography with a good deal of scientific information. (The only comparable work I can think of is Primo Levi's The Periodic Table.) Most readers will probably be drawn to it, and compelled to go on turning the pages, by the vivid evocation of the author's early life and remarkable family background. But this narrative is cleverly spliced with chapters on key discoveries in the history of physical science as they were assimilated by the young Sacks, and by the end of the book readers will find that they have learned, fairly painlessly, a good deal about science themselves.

Categories:

• Science & Math
  
  
  • Chemistry
    • General & Reference