Gratitude
2015 • 49 pages
Ratings16
Average rating4.3
15
Ratings16
Average rating4.3
"In July 2013, Oliver Sacks turned eighty and wrote [a] ... piece in The New York Times about the prospect of old age and the freedom he envisioned for himself in binding together the thoughts and feelings of a lifetime. Eighteen months later, he was given a diagnosis of terminal cancer--which he announced publically in another piece in The New York Times. Gratitude is Sacks's meditation on why life [continued] to enthrall him even as he [faced] the all-too-close presence of his own death, and how to live out the months that [remained] in the richest and deepest way possible"--
Reviews with the most likes.
Five stars for being so moving and well-written. Feel a little odd counting it toward my goal of books read because it's really only four short essays that were published after Sacks died. But, a book is a book.
For en fin liten bok, om aldring og død og om et liv vel levd. Selvbiografi fra en velskrivende mann.
Beautiful. These essays are still sifting through my consciousness, so it's difficult to say a lot right now. The avid sense of life throughout these pages is startling; not for what was said or declared, but rather how it made me, a living, healthy twenty something, realise how detached from my own walk I feel at times.
Comprising four short essays, this book can be read in one sitting, but I'm looking forward to going back to the individual pieces again and again. Sacks was a great thinker and writer, and here he is contemplating the end of his life, as we all must do eventually. One reaction you might have to the book is to fill your remaining days as full as you can. That's how I'm feeling just now.
