This is a lovely book that brings New York to life beautifully. It also tells us a little bit of the private life (and death) of Oliver Sacks who once told the husband of his niece when he asked Oliver what he had been doing outside lying on the grass, "I was wondering what it is like to be a rose." ( )

A moving account of the overlap in the lives of Bill Hayes and Oliver Sacks. ( )

This is the most beautiful book. It contains a few actual poems, but I kept thinking while I read it that every word was poetry. Succinct, expressive, impressionistic, divine. ( )

I was pretty skeptical about this book even before attempting it. Published about a year and a half after neurologist-author Oliver Sacks’s death, the memoir struck me as an opportunistic money grab on the part of the publishing industry and perhaps on the part of Sacks’s late-in-life partner as well. About 70 pages in, I decided I really didn’t care to read about Bill Hayes’s romantic relationship with Sacks, nor was I interested in the heretofore-unknown-to-me memoirist himself. A good part of the book is a sort of ode to New York City, not exactly a place whose praise I need or want to hear sung. I also found the fragmented and sometimes self-indulgent writing off putting. It does make me happy to think that Sacks found some personal happiness towards the end of his life, that hie was adored, but I found the appeal of the book very limited. ( )

This is a beautiful book about several things. First of all, it is a book about love - the love we find in our lives, the unexpected and overwhelming love that we feel when we meet certain people, but also the love for a city, the place where we choose to build our lives and where we feel complete. The stories of love in this book are bookended by the second theme - loss. It is the loss of his partner in the beginning of the book that makes Bill Hayes decide to move to New York. And, of course, the book finishes with the second loss, which any reader that knew and admired Oliver Sacks would be sadly expecting as the chapters moved on - his death in August 2015. Finally, by focusing on those two primordial and inevitable themes, the book becomes a book about life itself - our lives, marked by the ones we find and love, the ones we lose and mourn, and the places where we choose to be as happy as we can. It is a beautiful testament to the love between Hayes and Sacks, a touching portrait of Sacks himself in his intimacy, but also a heartfelt homage to New York - the city itself but, especially, the people that live in it, that commute in it, that work, play, suffer or wonder around its parks in insomniac nights.

Highly recommended. ( )