Laura J. Snyder is the author, most recently, of The Philosophical Breakfast Club: Four Remarkable Friends Who Transformed Science and Changed the World and Eye of the Beholder: Johannes Vermeer, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, and the Reinvention of Seeing. She is at work on a biography of Oliver Sacks, for which she has been awarded a Public Scholars Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.