Oliver Sacks wrote these four essays as he was dying of liver cancer. Yet he achieves in them all the hallmarks of truly transcendent writing- clarity, brevity, voice, timelessness of subject, elegance.. and most of all, a humanity of such immensity and depth that one feels as if close to the great scientist-writer’s soul, out in some miniature crystalline dimension. This miracle of spacetime, unique to art, was the only kind of afterlife that Sacks believed in, harboring a hope “that some of my books may still ‘speak’ to people after my death.” This book needs to be read, shared, re-read, gifted, re-gifted, whatever- these pages have top-notch magic.