Long before Oliver Sacks became a distinguished
neurologist and bestselling writer, he was a small English boy
fascinated by metals–also by chemical reactions (the louder and
smellier the better), photography, squids and cuttlefish, H.G.
Wells, and the periodic table. In this endlessly charming and
eloquent memoir, the author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a
Hat and Awakenings chronicles his love affair with science and the
magnificently odd and sometimes harrowing childhood in which that
love affair unfolded.
In Uncle Tungsten we meet Sacks’ extraordinary family, from his
surgeon mother (who introduces the fourteen-year-old Oliver to the
art of human dissection) and his father, a family doctor who imbues
in his son an early enthusiasm for housecalls, to his “Uncle
Tungsten,” whose factory produces tungsten-filament lightbulbs. We
follow the young Oliver as he is exiled at the age of six to a
grim, sadistic boarding school to escape the London Blitz, and
later watch as he sets about passionately reliving the exploits of
his chemical heroes–in his own home laboratory. Uncle Tungsten is a
crystalline view of a brilliant young mind springing to life, a
story of growing up which is by turns elegiac, comic, and wistful,
full of the electrifying joy of discovery.
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