A Leg to Stand On by Oliver Sacks

[lightreads]

A Leg to Stand On by Oliver W. Sacks


My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Sacks completely wrecked his leg in a run-in with a bull on a mountain in Norway, and barely got out alive. This is his memoir of his recovery, focusing on his post-operative distress to discover that the leg was psychologically absent from his body awareness, thanks probably to undiagnosed nerve damage.

I picked this up on a tangent from other research, and it was useful as subjective narrative. But it's also grossly overwritten in places. I'm kind of torn, because this book is clearly trauma post-processing from start to finish, and like a lot of post-trauma writing it's deeply self-involved and recursive and bound up in minutiae of memory that mean nothing to everyone who isn't Oliver Sacks. So kind of frustrating. But, I mean, I'm glad he wrote the book, because he clearly needed to.

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Comments

[livingbyfiction.livejournal.com]

I don't know if I'm with you on that last bit. Maybe he clearly needed to write the book, but did he need to publish it? As my bioethics professor once noted, there appears to be a taboo against middle-class people surviving life-threatening medical traumas and _not_ writing thoughtful, self-involved books about the experience.

[lightreads.livejournal.com]

Heh, it's a good point. The answer to which is that of course he had to publish it, because the self-involved ponderings of a wealthy white guy who encounters mortality are interesting to everyone. Obviously.