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... more
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Advantages: good book, worth reading Disadvantages: lots of big words, i had to get it from a library
...in 1985. Oliver Sacks, an author (‘Awakenings’ London 1973, 3rd. ed. 1983) and also a doctor specialising in neurology and this book is a compilation of some of his cases. It is split into four parts – ‘Losses’, ‘Excesses’, ‘Transports’ and ‘The World of the Simple’. ‘Losses’, tells the story of patients who is missing something, either part of eye sight, part or all of the memory or a sense of a limb, either having the feeling a missing limb or ... ...obviously written for readers with an interest in neurology, psychology or psychiatry, or someone who had some of the same problems as the patients in this book because of the content. If anyone were to read this book who is not familiar with neurology or psychology, I would advise them to have a dictionary to hand for the medical terms. This is a welcome book, although a little confusing but Oliver Sacks deals with the subject with both humour and ...
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Advantages: Fascinating, funny in places. Disadvantages: Sometimes want to learn more about one story
...His sight is restored through an operation and we follow his struggles to come to terms with his new sight, limited as it is. We come across an artist in San Fransisco obsessed with the village of his youth, who can produce stunning images of this village despite not having visited for many, many years. Finally Sacks moves onto look at Autism and how these people have troube interacting with "our" world, and the stunning skills of autistic savants, ... ...I wouldn?t exactly characterise this an an easy read, the book is straightforward to follow and you will not get a headache through trying to concentrate too hard! I have no background or education in biology or neurology, yet I could follow all the stories relatively easily. Though informative, the writing does not get bogged down with too much detail or terminology, and the fascinating nature of the stories and the lives of the characters in the ...
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Advantages: Brings humaniy to science and science to humanity. Disadvantages: Does use some specialist terms.
...antropologist on Mars" is how an Autistic lady described how she felt living in a world populated by "normals" as she called them!
The cases decribed are:
1. A painter who loses colour vision in a puzzling and disturbing way following a car accident.
2. A man who embraced hippie culture and Krishna who went on to develop a massive brain tumour leading to profound changes in personality and a loss of memory of anything post 1960s.
3. A gifted ... ...it once again completely.
5. An elderly Italian expat who had and painted vivid waking dreams of his hometown obsessively.
6. A teenage Autistic savant who possesses an incredible artistic ability.
7. A very highly functioning autistic lady who can understand animals to such a degree that she has become a leader in abbatoir and ranch design. Each of the seven cases described is facsinating in a unique way. It really is incredible to read how variations ...
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Advantages: A window to a different world Disadvantages: Vaguely voyeuristic
...to the world around him and forces Christopher to confront some of his greatest fears in pursuit of the truth.
This was one of those rare works of literature that enables the reader to see the world in a way that he has never seen it before. In this respect I can think only of Suskind's Perfume or Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude that enabled me to shift perceptions so successfully.
Despite being unable to tell a joke, Christopher is a warm and funny boy. Haddon has created a remarkable character and some of the most heartbreaking parent-child conversations in Literature. If you spend time with this book you will not regret it.
For more reading about Autism I can recommend OliverSacks writings about Temple Grandin in An Anthropologist on Mars and Dr. Grandin's own book about her life as a high-functioning autistic - Thinking...
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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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11.12.2003
