The Way We Live Now (association copy)

NY: Noonday Press (FSG), 1991. First edition. Softcover. Fine. An association copy, inscribed in purple ink on the half-title page: "For Oliver [Sacks]--with deep affection and admiration--Susan." 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 book is a short story that originally appeared in The New Yorker which describes a group of friends after they discover a close friend has AIDS. A wide octavo or small quarto in wraps with French flaps, illustrated with fold-out color etchings by Howard Hodgkin. Thirty pages exclusive of the etchings. A really handsome production, a fine copy, and an important association. 

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. 
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