An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical TalesNeurological patients, Oliver Sacks once wrote, are travellers to unimaginable lands. An Anthropologist on Mars 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 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. These are paradoxical tales, for neurological disease can conduct one to other modes of being that - however abnormal they may be to our way of thinking - may develop virtues and beauties of their own. The exploration of these individual lives is not one that can be made 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. He feels, he says, in part like a neuroanthropologist, but most of all like a physician, called here and there to make house calls, house calls at the far border of experience. Along the way, he shows us a new perspective on the way our brains construct our individual worlds. In his lucid and compelling reconstructions of the mental acts we take for granted - the act of seeing, the transport of memory, the notion of color - Oliver Sacks provokes anew a sense of wonder at who we are. |
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LibraryThing Review
User Review - Monkeypats - LibraryThingOut of seven stories, I enjoyed five. I think the book would have been better served with only five stories anyway as it was extremely dense and could not be considered a fast read by my standards ... Read full review
LibraryThing Review
User Review - Cheryl_in_CC_NV - LibraryThingI've known for many years I wanted to read something by Sacks - now I know I want to read everything by him. His focus is on the case histories, well, actually, on the people. Only by getting to know ... Read full review
Contents
The Last Hippie | 42 |
A Surgeons Life | 77 |
To See and Not See | 108 |
Copyright | |
4 other sections not shown
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able achromatopsia amnesia animals Anthropologist on Mars asked Asperger autistic autistic savants behavior Bennett black-and-white blind brain cerebral child Chris cognitive color color vision colorblindness completely cortex damage described diencephalon drawing dreams early emotional excited experience eyes feeling felt Franco frontal lobe gifted Greg Greg's grey human identity idiot savants images Jessy Park later learned light look Margaret memory mind neural neurological neurologist never normal Oliver Sacks once operation paintings patient perception perhaps Phineas Gage photographs play Pontito problems prodigious Ralph Siegel retina savant scene seemed seen sense showed sight sion social sometimes sort started Stephen Stephen Wiltshire strange sudden suddenly surgery syndrome talents talk Temple Temple's temporal lobe testing things thought tics tion tism told touch Tourette's Tourette's syndrome Tourettic Virgil vision visual walk wavelength wondered words
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Bibliographic information
| Title | An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales Vintage Series |
| Author | Oliver W. Sacks |
| Edition | illustrated, reprint |
| Publisher | Vintage Books, 1995 |
| ISBN | 0679756973, 9780679756972 |
| Length | 327 pages |
| Subjects | › Medical / Essays Medical / Neurology Psychology / Neuropsychology |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |