SOURCE: Gross, John. “The Man Who Fell in Love with a Table.” Spectator 287, no. 9047 (29 December 2001): 30-1.

In the following review, Gross views Uncle Tungsten as an insightful memoir and a noteworthy achievement.

When Oliver Sacks was a boy, one of his teachers wrote in an end-of-term report: ‘Sacks will go far if he does not go too far.’ Certainly the young Oliver didn't do things by halves. The great passion of his boyhood was chemistry, which he pursued with an astonishing energy; but that still left room for a swarm of lesser passions, from music to photography. Any one of them would have taken up a large slice of an ordinary boy's spare time.

Sacks's parents were doctors—his mother a gynaecologist, his father a GP—and from the outset there was an assumption that the future author of Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for...