Uncle Tungsten

Long before he wrote The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Awakenings, Oliver Sacks was a small English boy with an odd set of passions: metals, chemical reactions (the louder and smellier the better), photography, squids and cuttlefish, the novels of H.G. Wells, and the periodic table. This memoir looks back at that boyhood and at the way a love of science took hold of him, in a childhood that was by turns magnificent, strange and sometimes harrowing.

The cast of characters is remarkable. His mother was a surgeon who, when he was fourteen, introduced him to human dissection. His father, a family doctor, passed on his own enthusiasm for making housecalls. Then there is the Uncle Tungsten of the title, whose factory made tungsten-filament lightbulbs and who helped open the world of metals to his young nephew.

Not all of it is warm. At six, Sacks was sent away from London to escape the Blitz and landed in a grim, sadistic boarding school. Back at home, he threw himself into reliving the experiments of his chemical heroes in a laboratory of his own, learning by doing and delighting in each discovery.

The result is an elegiac, funny and wistful account of a brilliant young mind coming alive. Sacks writes with the same curiosity and storytelling gift that mark his celebrated case histories, and conveys the electric joy of finding out how the world works.