Illness as Metaphor and Aids and its Metaphors (association copy)

NY: Anchor, 1989. Near fine. A standout association copy, inscribed on the half-title page: "For Oliver [Sacks], with deep love and admiration--Susan. 3/29/90." Uncommon signed, with no other signed copies available as of this writing. Sacks and Sontag were friends and both wrote with deep sophistication about illness, one as a public intellectual and philosopher, the other as an accomplished physician. This volume collects her 1978 celebrated book-length essay Illness as Metaphor and its sequel published a decade later, in 1989, Aids and Its Metaphor. A near fine paperback original (only published in paperback) with light edgewear and toning to pages.

Oliver Sacks was a British neurologist that the New York Times dubbed "the poet laureate of contemporary medicine." He spent the bulk of his medical career as a professor of neurology at Yeshiva University's Albert Einstein College of Medicine. There he began to write about some of his neurology patients (he burned the manuscript of his first book, Ward 23, in a fit of anxiety about his new direction). He went on to publish fourteen books from 1970 to 2015, the year he died also of cancer, most of them with a focus on highly researched clinical anecdotes, including such lauded works as The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (the main case study of which is a man with "face blindness," something Sacks also suffered from, and which deeply impacted his social interactions) and The Island of the Colorblind. .