Talent Overview

Steiner Talent has the pleasure of providing Oliver Sacks for personal appearances and performances for special events and corporate functions. To book Oliver Sacks for your corporate event, private party or performance venue through Steiner Talent, inquire about booking fees and availability by calling us at (866) 319-0050 or by filling in the details of your event by clicking here. One of our agents will respond to your request within 24 hours.

Appearance and performance fees for Oliver Sacks are determined by a number of factors, including availability, location of corporate or private event, date of event, tour routing schedule and Oliver Sacks's interest level of appearing at your event. Please be sure to be specific about your event, including your entertainment budget, so that we can help you decide on suitable entertainment for your event.

We look forward to helping secure Oliver Sacks on your date for your corporate event, private event or venue.

Oliver Sacks is best known for his many writings as a neurologist, patient and music lover. Dr. Sacks is available for lectures, speaking engagements, fund raiser and corporate events.

Biography

Oliver Sacks was born in 1933 in London, England into a family of physicians and scientists (his mother was a surgeon and his father a general practitioner). He earned his medical degree at Oxford University (Queen's College), and did residencies and fellowship work at Mt. Zion Hospital in San Francisco and at UCLA. Since 1965, he has lived in New York, where he is a practicing neurologist. In July of 2007, he was appointed a Professor of Clinical Neurology and Clinical Psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center, and he was designated Columbia University's first Columbia Artist.

In 1966 Dr. Sacks began working as a consulting neurologist for Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx, a chronic care hospital where he encountered an extraordinary group of patients, many of whom had spent decades in strange, frozen states, like human statues, unable to initiate movement. He recognized these patients as survivors of the great pandemic of sleepy sickness that had swept the world from 1916 to 1927, and treated them with a then-experimental drug, L-dopa, which enabled them to come back to life. They became the subjects of his book Awakenings, which later inspired a play by Harold Pinter ("A Kind of Alaska") and the Oscar-nominated feature film ("Awakenings") with Robert De Niro and Robin Williams.

Sacks is perhaps best known for his collections of case histories from the far borderlands of neurological experience, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars, in which he describes patients struggling to live with conditions ranging from Tourette's syndrome to autism, parkinsonism, musical hallucination, epilepsy, phantom limb syndrome, schizophrenia, retardation, and Alzheimer's disease.

He has investigated the world of Deaf people and sign language in Seeing Voices, and a rare community of colorblind people in The Island of the Colorblind. He has written about his experiences as a doctor in Migraine and as a patient in A Leg to Stand On. His autobiographical Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood was published in 2001, and his most recent book is Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (Knopf, 2007).

Sacks's work, which has been supported by the Guggenheim Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, regularly appears in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, as well as various medical journals. The New York Times has referred to Dr. Sacks as "the poet laureate of medicine," and in 2002 he was awarded the Lewis Thomas Prize by Rockefeller University, which recognizes the scientist as poet. He is an honorary fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and holds honorary degrees from many universities, including Oxford, the Karolinska Institute, Georgetown, Bard, Gallaudet, Tufts, and the Catholic University of Peru.

More Information

Performance Fee: Fee available upon request

Link to this page: steinertalent.com/profile/oliver_sacks

Steiner Talent is the booking agent working on your behalf as an entertainment broker/producer for corporate functions, private engagements and special events and does not claim or represent itself as the exclusive booking agent, booking agency or management of Oliver Sacks, unless specified above. Because we are not the exclusive talent or booking agent for Oliver Sacks, we are unable to answer fan club information requests, fan mail, public relations inquiries, or provide contact information for Oliver Sacks. Our agency works exclusively with corporate event planners, private party planners, talent buyers and wedding planners and we cannot respond to inquiries regarding entertainers' availability inquiries that do not meet our guidelines.

We look forward to helping secure Oliver Sacks on your date for your corporate event, private event or venue.