"In July 2013, Oliver Sacks turned eighty and wrote [a] ... piece in The New York Times about the prospect of old age and the freedom he envisioned for himself in binding together the thoughts and feelings of a lifetime. Eighteen months later, he was given a diagnosis of terminal cancer--which he announced publicly in another piece in The New York Times. Gratitude is Sacks's meditation on why life continued to enthrall him even as he faced the all-too-close presence of his own death, and how to live out the months that remained in the richest and deepest way possible"--,Provided by publisher.