Journalist biographer to visit Winslow book shop

Award-winning journalist and author Lawrence Weschler will visit Eagle Harbor Book Company to talk about his new book, “And How Are You, Dr. Sacks? A Biographical Memoir of Oliver Sacks.”

The author event is 7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 10. The event is free and open to the public.

Weschler began spending time with Sacks in the early 1980s, when he set out to profile the neurologist for The New Yorker. Almost a decade earlier, Sacks had published his masterpiece “Awakenings,” the account of his long-dormant patient’s miraculous-but-troubling return to life in a Bronx hospital ward. But the book had hardly been an immediate success, and the rumpled clinician was still largely unknown.

Over the next four years, the two men worked closely together until, for wracking personal reasons, Sacks asked Weschler to abandon the profile, a request to which Weschler acceded.

The two remained close friends, however, across the next 30 years and then, just as Sacks was dying, he urged Weschler to take up the project once again.

This book is the result of that entreaty.

Weschler was, for more than 20 years, a staff writer at The New Yorker, where his work “shuttled between political tragedies and cultural comedies.”

He is a two-time winner of the George Polk Award (for Cultural Reporting in 1988 and Magazine Reporting in 1992) and was also a recipient of Lannan Literary Award (1998).

Visit www.eagleharborbooks.com to learn more.