An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales (Signed First)

Sacks, Oliver

ISBN 10: 0330337173 / ISBN 13: 9780330337175

Published by Picador, 1995

First edition, first impression, signed and dated at publication to the title page by Oliver Sacks - signed examples of the UK edition are scarce. Fine: tight and square binding in sharp red boards; very tight, crisp and clean, presenting as unread. The unclipped dustwrapper is Near Fine: crisp and vibrant; Fine but for a little fading to the cream background colour at the spine; presented in a removable, archival-quality protective cover. A handsome copy with the distinction of the author's signature. All orders are sent very carefully wrapped in bubble wrap and sturdy cardboard. Seller Inventory # M624

Synopsis:

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.

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)

Bibliographic Details

Title: An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical...
Publisher: Picador
Publication Date: 1995
Binding: Hardcover
Condition: Fine
Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine
Signed: Signed by Author(s)
Edition: 1st Edition