Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood by Oliver Sacks, Oliver Sacks

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The Barnes & Noble Review
This marvelous autobiographical tale is more about chemistry than the day-to-day doings of its subject, and that may be what gives it its considerable charm.

Evacuated from wartime London at the age of six, Sacks spent four years at a boarding school in the country, where he suffered deeply from neglect and the sadistic cruelty of the headmaster. What sustained him was a budding scientific sensibility, which distracted him from his own misery and focused his gaze on the immutable and minute mysteries of the natural world. After he was returned home, this incipient passion blossomed into a full-blown obsession with chemistry. And here the adventure begins.

Sacks writes: "My first taste was for the spectacular -- the frothings, the incandescences, the stinks and the bangs, which almost define a first entry into chemistry." With a few key texts in hand, the smitten boy sets out systematically to perform for himself all the experiments they describe, determined to live the history of chemistry in himself. He shares that history with us, from Lavoisier's conquest over phlogiston to Davy's elegant dissection of compounds by electrolysis to Dalton's stubborn insistence on the existence of the atom, which inspires in him "a sort of rapture, thinking that the mysterious proportionalities and numbers one saw on a gross scale in the lab might reflect an invisible, infinitesimal, inner world of atoms, dancing, touching, attracting, and combining" -- a glorious epiphany that every lover of chemistry gets to experience for himself.

Sacks is encouraged in his chemical pursuits by a cast of eccentric family members, each with his or her own brand of scientific obsession. The best is Uncle Dave, affectionately dubbed Uncle Tungsten, for he lives and breathes that versatile metal. Oddly, Sacks was not destined to become a chemist. For some reason never fully understood, he and his first love parted ways when he was about 14 or 15, and he ultimately went on to become a renowned neurologist. Nevertheless, we can take solace in knowing that the life-affirming intellectual passion that chemistry imparted to him was not to be wasted. (Amy Bianco)

From the Publisher

From his earliest days, Oliver Sacks—the distinguished neurologist who is also one of the most remarkable storytellers of our time—was irresistibly drawn to understanding the natural world. Born into a large family of doctors, metallurgists, chemists, physicists, and teachers, his curiosity was encouraged and abetted by aunts, uncles, parents, and older brothers. But soon after his sixth birthday, the Second World War broke out and he was evacuated from London—as were hundreds of thousands of children—to escape the bombing. Exiled to a school that rivaled Dickens's grimmest, fed on a steady diet of turnips and beetroots, tormented by a sadistic headmaster, and allowed home only once in four years, he felt desolate and abandoned.

When he returned to London in 1943 at the age of ten, he was a changed, withdrawn boy, one who desperately needed order to make sense of his life. He was sustained by his secret passions: for numbers, for metals, and for finding patterns in the world around him. Under the tutelage of his "chemical" uncle, Uncle Tungsten, Sacks began to experiment with "the stinks and bangs that almost define a first entry into chemistry": tossing sodium off a bridge to see it take fire in the water below; producing billowing clouds of noxious-smelling chemicals in his home lab. As his interests spread to investigations of batteries and bulbs, vacuum tubes and photography, he discovered his first great scientific heroes—men and women whose genius lay in understanding the hidden order of things and disclosing the forces that sustain and support the tangible world. There was Humphry Davy, the boyish chemist who delighted in sending flaming globules of metal shooting across his lab; Marie Curie, whose heroic efforts in isolating radium would ultimately lead to the unlocking of the secrets of the atom; and Dmitri Mendeleev, inventor of the periodic table, whose pursuit of the classification of elements unfolds like a detective story.

Uncle Tungsten vividly evokes a time when virtual reality had not yet displaced a hands-on knowledge of the world. It draws us into a journey of discovery that reveals, through the enchantment and wonder of a childhood passion, the birth of an extraordinary and original mind.

WashingtonPost.com - David Lodge

In Uncle Tungsten, Sacks carries this project into new and more personal territory. It is an unusual book, for it combines autobiography with a good deal of scientific information. (The only comparable work I can think of is Primo Levi's The Periodic Table.) Most readers will probably be drawn to it, and compelled to go on turning the pages, by the vivid evocation of the author's early life and remarkable family background. But this narrative is cleverly spliced with chapters on key discoveries in the history of physical science as they were assimilated by the young Sacks, and by the end of the book readers will find that they have learned, fairly painlessly, a good deal about science themselves.

nytimes.com - Natalie Angier

This memoir is a rare gem in a flea-market genre: it teaches us about much more than the life and whines of Oliver Sacks. At the same time, the author doesn't hide behind other lives or pedantry, or waggle his intellect like a sort of showy, distracting secondary sexual characteristic. Bit by bit, we come to know him, his sorrows, his emotional longings and limitations. With Uncle Tungsten, Sacks has reignited the fire, so the rest of us can read by its glow.

Publishers Weekly

Sacks, a neurologist perhaps best known for his books Awakenings (which became a Robin Williams/Robert De Niro vehicle) and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, invokes his childhood in wartime England and his early scientific fascination with light, matter and energy as a mystic might invoke the transformative symbolism of metals and salts. The "Uncle Tungsten" of the book's title is Sacks's Uncle Dave, who manufactured light bulbs with filaments of fine tungsten wire, and who first initiated Sacks into the mysteries of metals. The author of this illuminating and poignant memoir describes his four tortuous years at boarding school during the war, where he was sent to escape the bombings, and his profound inquisitiveness cultivated by living in a household steeped in learning, religion and politics (both his parents were doctors and his aunts were ardent Zionists). But as Sacks writes, the family influence extended well beyond the home, to include the groundbreaking chemists and physicists whom he describes as "honorary ancestors, people to whom, in fantasy, I had a sort of connection." Family life exacted another transformative influence as well: his older brother Michael's psychosis made him feel that "a magical and malignant world was closing in about him," perhaps giving a hint of what led the author to explore the depths of psychosis in his later professional life. For Sacks, the onset of puberty coincided with his discovery of biology, his departure from his childhood love of chemistry and, at age 14, a new understanding that he would become a doctor. Many readers and patients are happy with that decision. (Oct.) Forecast: This book is as well-written as Sacks's earlier works,and should get fans engrossed in the facts of his life and opinions. Look for an early spike on the strength of his name, and strong sales thereafter. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Paula Rohrlick - KLIATT

Neurologist Sacks, famous for his book Awakenings (which was made into a film starring Robin Williams) among other case studies on the often peculiar workings of the brain, here describes his early fascination with science, and in particular chemistry, in an erudite, beautifully written, delightful and often funny memoir. Sacks grew up in wartime London, in a Jewish family of talented scientists. Both his parents were physicians; his "Uncle Tungsten" (really Dave) manufactured light bulbs with tungsten filaments. Other relatives were scientists and doctors as well, and all encouraged his interest in the "stinks and bangs" of chemistry, and his explorations in photography, magnetism, and radiology, too. Exiled to a cruel boarding school to avoid the Blitz, concerned that like one of his older brothers he might go mad, Sacks sought refuge as a child in the order and constancy of chemistry. In addition to experimenting in a home lab (conveniently located near the back garden, so that if something caught fire "I could rush outside with it and fling it on the lawn"), he studied and greatly admired the early chemists such as Robert Boyle, Antoine Lavoisier, Humphry Davy, and Marie Curie. He makes their explorations and achievements come alive for the reader; this is as much a history of the science of chemistry as a memoir of Sacks' early years, and he manages to interweave the two effortlessly, drawing memorable portraits of chemists and physicists as well as family members. One can see how his interest in "the human aspects" of science developed. It doesn't take a scientific background to enjoy Sacks' memoir, but his passion for his subject matter is contagious, and even non-scientificallyinclined readers will enjoy this and come away with a new appreciation of the field of chemistry. KLIATT Codes: SA*—Exceptional book, recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2001, Random House, Vintage, 338p. illus.,

Product Details

• Table of Contents
• Interviews & Essays
• Read an Excerpt

Table of Contents

Interviews & Essays

Read an Excerpt

Introduction

In 1966, he first encountered the survivors of the great epidemic of sleeping sickness, which had killed millions in the 1920':s. With his administration of the new drug L-DOPA, he saw these patients - frozen for decades - awaken with "an explosive quality, as of corks released from a great depth." His bestselling book about their experiences, Awakenings, inspired Harold Pinter':s play, A Kind of Alaska (produced both in London and New York) and the Penny Marshall film Awakenings, starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams, which was nominated for an Oscar for Best Picture of the Year.

The bestselling The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat brought Sacks': work to even greater public attention with heartbreaking and inspiring tales of patients with perceptions remarkably altered by various neurological conditions. It was adapted into a play by Peter Brook and an opera by Michael Nyman, both produced worldwide.

"Oliver Sacks was truly wonderful. I was amazed that he could communicate so intimately with an audience of 800 people, which he did, and still talk so thoughtfully and intelligently about creativity, providing every person with something to think about."
Oklahoma Scholar-Leadership Enrichment Program

His more recent works include The Island of the Colorblind, which combines his fascination with medical mysteries with his love of botany and South Seas travel; and An Anthropologist on Mars, a collection of clinical tales. One of these tales inspired the feature film At First Sight, starring Val Kilmer and Mira Sorvino. A multi-part BBC-TV series Oliver Sacks: The Mind Traveler, was featured in the United States on PBS.

In the fall of 2001, Dr. Sacks will publish Uncle Tungsten: Memories of A Chemical Boyhood, in which he looks back at his childhood in wartime London, revealing his boyhood love of chemistry as the source of his life long scientific curiosity. He is a member of the faculty at New York University Medical Center and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

Sacks celebrates the humanity of those whose minds are imprisoned by a different consciousness and applauds "the freedom and potential of the human spirit against a physiological fate." His warmth and wisdom have made him a beloved public speaker.