Uncle Tungsten
Oliver Sacks · 2001 · 352 pages
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About this book
"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 "When he returned to London in 1943 at the age of ten, he was a changed, withdrawn boy, one who desperately needed order to make sense of his life.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 u
Appears in these reading paths
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