"Awakenings"--which inspired the major motion picture--is the remarkable story o
f 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 an
d women were given up as hopeless until 1969, when Dr. Oliver Sacks gave them th
e 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 which went with their reintroduction to a chan
ged world.