Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood

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, squids and cuttlefish, H.G. Wells, and the periodic table. In this endlessly charming and eloquent memoir, the author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Awakenings chronicles his love affair with science and the magnificently odd and sometimes harrowing childhood in which that love affair unfolded.

In Uncle Tungsten we meet Sacks' extraordinary family, from his surgeon mother (who introduces the fourteen-year-old Oliver to the art of human dissection) 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 at the age of six 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. Uncle Tungsten is a crystalline view of a brilliant young mind springing to life, a story of growing up which is by turns elegiac, comic, and wistful, full of the electrifying joy of discovery.

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 09/17/2002
ISBN: 9780375704048
Pages: 337
Weight: 0.75lbs
Size: 7.90h x 5.20w x 0.70d

Review Citations: BookPage 10/01/2002 pg. 25
New York Times 09/22/2002 pg. 28
Entertainment Weekly 10/18/2002 pg. 118
Kliatt 03/01/2003 pg. 53
People Weekly 09/14/2015 pg. 50

Accelerated Reader Quiz #/Name: 60053 / Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood
Reading Level: 10.7 / Interest Level: Upper Grade / Point Value: 25