Weschler Talks on Oliver Sacks book

For over twenty years (1981-2002), Mr. Weschler was a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine, where his work shuttled between political tragedies and cultural comedies. Among his twenty-some-odd books, those on politics include The Passion of Poland (1984) and A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers (1990). His books on cultural figures include Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder (1995, which was shortlisted for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award); Boggs: A Comedy of Values  (1999) and  Twenty Five Years of Conversation with David Hockney.

He is also a two-time winner of the George Polk Award (for Cultural and Magazine Reporting). Weschler has taught at Princeton, Columbia, UC Santa Cruz, Bard, Vassar, Sarah Lawrence and Brown universities. He is director emeritus of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU and also the artistic director emeritus with the Chicago Humanities Festival.

Once, happening upon a Portuguese edition of Weschler’s 1990 book on torture in Latin America during a photo opportunity in a Rio shopping mall, Chilean General Augusto Pinochet flipped through its pages for a few moments, whereupon he pronounced, “Lies, all lies.  The author is a liar and a hypocrite.”