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Compulsively readable. . . . Dr. Sacks writes beautifully and with exceptional subtlety and penetration into both the state of mind of his patients and the nature of illness generally. . . . A brilliant and humane book. A. Alvarez, The Observer Awakenings which inspired the major motion picture is the remarkable story of a group of patients who contracted sleeping-sickness during the great epidemic just after World War I. Frozen for decades in a trance-like state, these men and women were given up as hopeless until 1969, when Dr. Oliver Sacks gave them the then-new drug L-DOPA, which had an astonishing, explosive, awakening effect. Dr. Sacks recounts the moving case histories of his patients, their lives, and the extraordinary transformations that went with their reintroduction to a changed world. [Sacks] opens to the reader doors of perception generally passed through only by those at the far borders of human experience. The Boston Globe One of the most beautifully composed and moving works of our time. The Washington Post A masterpiece. W. H. Auden
