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Title details for An Anthropologist on Mars by Oliver Sacks - Available

An Anthropologist on Mars

Seven Paradoxical Tales

by Oliver Sacks
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This collection of essays are mainly casebook studies. Neurological patients, Oliver Sacks once wrote, are travellers to unimaginable lands.
This book offers portraits of seven such travellers, including a surgeon consumed by the compulsive tics of Tourette's syndrome unless he is operating, an artist who loses all sense of colour in a car accident, but finds a new sensibility and creative power in black and white, and an autistic professor who cannot decipher the simplest social exchange between humans, but has built a career out of her intuitive understanding of animal behaviour.
These are paradoxical tales, for neurological disease can conduct one or other modes of being, which - however abnormal they may be to our way of thinking - may develop beauties and virtues of their own. Thus one young man, Stephen Wiltshire, who is both retarded and autistic, nonetheless has produced thousands of astonishing drawings.
The exploration of these individual lives is not one that can be conducted in a consulting room or office, and Sacks has taken off his white coat and deserted the hospital, by and large, to join his subjects in their own environments.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    February 1, 1995

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9781743039625

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9781743039625
      • File size: 4137 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from January 30, 1995
      Among doctors who write with acuity and grace, Sacks (The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat) takes a higher place with each successive book. In this provocative collection of previously published essays, the noted neurologist describes his meetings with seven people whose ``abnormalities'' in brain function generate new perspectives on the workings of that organ, the nature of experience and concepts of personality and consciousness. ``It's not gentle,'' notes Canadian surgeon Carl Bennett of Tourette's syndrome; Bennett's compulsive lungings, tics and speech patterns are stilled when he is in the operating room and moderated, Sacks observes firsthand from the passenger seat, while Bennett is flying his Cessna Cardinal. The broad effects and differing degrees of autism are probed in his conversations and observations, over many years, with Stephen Wiltshire, an autistic British artist-prodigy, and his visit with Temple Grandin, an animal behavior specialist. Writing with eloquent particularity and compassionate respect, Sacks enlarges our view of the nature of human experience. Illustrations. 100,000 first printing; BOMC selection; author tour; Random House AudioBook (ISBN 0-679-43956-0, $17).

    • Publisher's Weekly

      February 12, 1996
      Neurologist Sacks presents seven case studies of people whose ``abnormalities'' of brain function offer new insights into conceptions of human personality and consciousness.

Formats

  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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