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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