An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales - Hardcover

Sacks, Oliver

4.15

22,152 ratings by Goodreads

9780330337175: An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0330337173 ISBN 13: 9780330337175

Publisher: Picador, 1995

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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, none-the-less 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. Sacks also offers a perspective on the way our brains construct our individual worlds, and reconstructs the mental acts that are largely taken for granted - the act of seeing, the transport of memory and the notice of colour.

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Review:

Sacks' great gift is his capacity to place himself in the position of his subjects, to see the world the way they see it and to empathize with their condition with great compassion but without patronage or pity. (Daily Telegraph)

Writing simply and beautifully, Sacks uses individual case histories to reveal the infinite complexities of the human mind. (Daily Mail)

Book Description:

The bestselling author of Awakenings, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Musicophilia.

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