Compulsively readable… . Dr. Sacks writes beautifully and with exceptional subtlety and penetration into both the state of mind of his patients and the nature of illness generally… . A brilliant and humane book. - A. Alvarez, The ObserverAwakenings - which inspired the major motion picture - is the remarkable story of a group of patients who contracted sleeping-sickness during the great epidemic just after World War I. Frozen for decades in a trance-like state, these men and women were given up as hopeless until 1969, when Dr. Oliver Sacks gave them the then-new drug L-DOPA, which had an astonishing, explosive, awakening effect. Dr. Sacks recounts the moving case histories of his patients, their lives, and the extraordinary transformations that went with their reintroduction to a changed world. [Sacks] opens to the reader doors of perception generally passed through only by those at the far borders of human experience. - The Boston Globe One of the most beautifully composed and moving works of our time. - The Washington Post A masterpiece. - W. H. Auden