An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales

by Oliver Sacks

Overview

From the bestselling author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat • Fascinating portraits of neurological disorder in which men, women, and one extraordinary child emerge as brilliantly adaptive personalities, whose conditions have not so much debilitated them as ushered them into another reality.

Here are seven detailed narratives of neurological patients, including a surgeon consumed by the compulsive tics of Tourette's syndrome unless he is operating; an artist who loses all sense of color 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 behavior.

Sacks combines the well honed mind of an academician with the verve of a true storyteller.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780345805881
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/14/2012
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	226,060
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

Oliver Sacks was born in 1933 in London and was educated at Queen's College, Oxford. He completed his medical training at San Francisco's Mount Zion Hospital and at UCLA before moving to New York.Familiar to the readers of The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, Dr. Sacks spent more than fifty years working as a neurologist and wrote many books, including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Musicophilia, and Hallucinations, about the strange neurological predicaments and conditions of his patients. The New York Times referred to him as "the poet laureate of medicine," and over the years he received many awards, including honors from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Royal College of Physicians. His memoir On the Move was published shortly before his death in August 2015.

Hometown:

New York, New York

Date of Birth:

1933

Place of Birth:

London, England

Education:

B.M., B.Ch., Queen's College, Oxford, 1958

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Preface

The Case of the Colorblind Painter
The Last Hippie
A Surgeon's Life
To See and Not See
The Landscape of His Dreams
Prodigies
An Anthropologist on Mars

Selected Bibliography
References
Index

Editorial Reviews

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). (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly