Uncle Tungsten - Memories of a Chemical Boyhood

Oliver Sacks

Vintage

2001

337 páginas

11h 14m

ISBN-10: 0375404481

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, cuttlefish, H. G. Wells, and the periodic table. In this endlessly charming and eloquent memoir, he chronicles his love affair with science and the magnificently odd and sometimes harrowing childhood in wicht that love affair unfolded.

We meet Sacks's extraordinary family, from his surgeon mother (who introduces the fourteen-year-old Oliver to the art of human dissecation) 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 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. By turns elegiac and comic, Uncle Tungsten is the story of a brilliant young mind springing to life.

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