Arts & Photography
Audio CDs
Audiocassettes
Biographies & Memoirs
Business & Investing
Children's Books
Christianity
Comics & Graphic Novels
Computers & Internet
Cooking, Food & Wine
Entertainment
Gay & Lesbian
Health, Mind & Body
History
Home & Garden
Horror
Literature & Fiction
Mystery & Thrillers
Nonfiction
Outdoors & Nature
Parenting & Families
Professional & Technical
Reference
Religion & Spirituality
Romance
Science
Science Fiction & Fantasy
Sports
Teens
Travel
Women's Fiction
|
|
An Anthropologist on Mars : Paradoxical Tales |
List Price: $17.00
Your Price: |
|
|
|
Product Info |
Reviews |
Rating: Summary: Oliver Sacks Sends a Postcard from Mars Review: Oliver Sacks' "An Anthropologist on Mars" is more than a collection of fascinating neurological case studies. Not only does Sacks offer a generous and holistic view of his subjects as complex individuals living in the real world, but he uses their disorders to raise provocative questions about what human Selfhood and intelligence mean. Is the color we see an objective external quality that is simply received by the brain, or is it constructed through an engagement between the brain and the environment? Are the memories that define our sense of who we are stored intact by the brain, awaiting retrieval, or must they be endlessly re-created? What are the potential relationships between memory and creativity, between art and disease, or between spirituality and disease? And perhaps most importantly, how can we separate the essence of individual identity from a lifelong neurological disorder, and at what cost is such a separation achieved? My only regret is that Sacks did not write some sort of postscript to bring together, and discuss more fully side-by-side, the many interesting question raised throughout this rich text.
Rating: Summary: Underscores the complexity of the human mind Review: Oliver Sacks' An Anthropologist on Mars is a delightful and enlightening book that reveals the unparalleled complexity of the human brain.
Sacks, an accomplished neurologist and author, presents seven case studies that highlight different neurological phenomena. In his case studies, Sacks follows a newly colorblind painter, a man who can create no new memories, a surgeon with Tourette's syndrome, a blind man who regains his sight, a painter obsessed with images from his childhood, an autistic boy artist, and a high-functioning autistic professor. Sacks does not treat his case studies as dry medical oddities but rather discusses their neurological experiences within their broader human existence. Unlike other authors who know their patients only distantly, Sacks works intimately with his case studies and develops meaningful relationships that translate into a deeper, more insightful understanding of his patients and their experiences.
While Sacks is clearly a brilliant neurologist, what makes this book so powerful is his ability to weave in medicine, science, history, and philosophy into a coherent narrative. Every case study illuminates a series of important and thought-provoking questions that challenge the everyday assumptions of perception, reality, intelligence, and what it means to be human. In the end, the reader emerges with a better appreciation of the complexity of the human mind.
The book is very well documented with copious footnotes provided throughout the book. Occasionally, Sacks neglects to define some arcane medical terms, so readers would do well to keep a dictionary close at hand. Overall, the book is highly accessible to the general reader who will find it intriguing and intellectually rewarding.
Rating: Summary: detachment? Review: Oliver Sacks's title "An Anthropologist from Mars" suggests detachment(35 million miles) yet he investigates the intimate details of human perception. It took me nearly 50 pages to remember to see that it is his literary zoom lens that I find so fascinating. From the 5x of historical perspective to the 500x of a patient's diagnosis he twirls the lens. I love it.
Rating: Summary: Very good... Review: Sacks' style is generally enjoyable and the book is very well done. The book is simply very good. Sacks' style can get a bit tedious at times, but is usually very good
Rating: Summary: Unforgettable people Review: Science, medicine and psychology aside, these people who are triumphing over the most inhuman odds are unforgettable and inspiring. Most would be unlovable to us if we knew them personally, but that's not important. All of us know people who've had many more advantages in life who have not lived up to their potentials. These folks more than make up for the underachievers. They're all somehow brilliant in their own rights.
Rating: Summary: Unforgettable people Review: Science, medicine and psychology aside, these people who are triumphing over the most inhuman odds are unforgettable and inspiring. Most would be unlovable to us if we knew them personally, but that's not important. All of us know people who've had many more advantages in life who have not lived up to their potentials. These folks more than make up for the underachievers. They're all somehow brilliant in their own rights.
Rating: Summary: The gift of mental illness Review: So you thought that a mental illness is devastating, debilitating, and tragic? Well think again.
Oliver Sacks delivers a new interpretation of mentall disorders: one of a gift. An autistic woman uses her lack of emotional contact with humans to tap into the psyche of cows. The suddenly color-blind artist starts to paint in black and white.
In seven amazing stories, Sacks, in his clear, human, introspective, and funny story telling, gives as enough reason to re-evaluate our view of mental disabilities. His book is both a celebration of life and a testament to the triumph of the human spirit.
In a time when tolerance and diversity are political buzzwords, Oliver Sacks gives us concrete reasons to apply those words. This book is simply incredible.
Rating: Summary: FASCINATING CASE STUDIES OF ADAPTIVE BEHAVIOR Review: The book describes how seven people with serious disorders live creative and/or happy lives. It is fascinating how they adapt to their mental and physical problems and are satisfied with their lives. Some of the case studies focus on patients who have had problems since early childhood, while others focus on patients who developed the problems late in live. One case study shows how restoring partial eyesight to a patient who had been blind since early childhood completely destroyed his adaptive behavior and did not result in a happier life for him. If I had read a novel in which the characters were modelled after the people in this book, I would have considered the novel a fantasy. This book definitely expanded my understanding of human behavior.
Rating: Summary: Sacks' gift - Seing patients as individuals Review: The description of clinical cases is not the commonest idea of a 'good time', especially for non-medical population. The usually dry and technically difficult prose plus the obscurity of the subject, provokes, even in accustomed mind of the physician, an unwillingness to proceed past the first 10 pages. I'm happy to say that, as usual, Sacks combines the well honed mind of a academician with the verve of a true stroryteller, and manages to produce a book at once acessible and challenging. The capacity to observe the patient as a different form of human being, instead of as just an 'interesting case', is a true insight into what Medicine should be; furthermore, as the author insistently teaches, neurological diseases differ from other ailments in that they become a true portion of the persona, and ,in a sense, they belong to the patient, whereas most people consider disease to be something that 'happens' to them, an outside influence not to be confused with the true Self. In every way, this book should be required reading for all neurologists - and physicians in general - , but let that not deter you from reading, and enjoying it: it is a truly acessible and moving book, and teaches us all something about the diversity and depths of the human kind.
Rating: Summary: Extraordinary; a work of genius Review: These are true tales from a clinical neurologist's notebook, but this isn't just any neurologist. Oliver Sacks, author of the justly celebrated, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1986) and Awakenings (1973), which was later made into a movie starring Robert DeNiro and Robin Williams, and other works, is a gifted writer with a fine sense of story and an even finer sense of humanity. He has a style that is both affecting and fascinating, yet studiously objective, a style laced with footnotes and clinical observations, historical comparisons and wisdom. Part of the power of these tales, and of all of Sacks's work, is his ability to be totally engaged and to identify with the subject while part of him is off to the side observing with scientific impartiality. This makes for a compelling read. If you've never read Sacks before, you are in for a very special treat.
These tales are paradoxical because "Defects, disorders, diseases" can bring out "latent powers, developments, evolutions, forms of life, that might never be seen or even be imaginable, in their absence." It is this "'creative' potential, that forms the central theme of this book" (from Sacks's Preface, page xvi).
The first tale, "The Case of the Colorblind Painter" is about a successful artist who worked in color all his life only to became colorblind at age sixty-five, and the effect this had on his life and work. The second, "The Last Hippie" is about an amnesiac man with a frontal lobe tumor that left him stranded in the sixties. Sacks tells this sad, pathetic story with vivid detail, and characteristically ends it with a footnote, a footnote of such warmth and genuine identification that we are moved to tears. (Don't skip the footnotes!)
The third tale, "A Surgeon's Life," is an amazing account of a Canadian surgeon with Tourette's syndrome. It is here that we begin to see the central theme of this book in brilliant illumination. Dr. Carl Bennett, riddled with the bizarre tics characteristic of the disorder, compulsions that cause him to throw things, to touch things again and again in a ritualistic manner, to flail, jump and jerk about, nonetheless became a very successful (and beloved) doctor of surgery. Sacks scrubs up with Dr. Bennett and goes into surgery with him, during which, miraculously, the tics disappear for however long it takes to complete the surgery. Sacks visits him at home and meets his wife and two children, sees the dents in the refrigerator and on the walls, and comes away with a sense of how astounding the human potential to overcome adversity can be.
The fourth tale, "To See and Not See," is about partially restored sight and how it was not a blessing. This sad story illustrates how sight is learned from infancy and is largely a constructive and interpretive function of the brain. This tale also lets us see how the world of the sightless can be rich and fulfilling beyond our imagination.
In the fifth tale, "The Landscape of His Dreams, we meet a gifted artist, Franco Magnani, who from memory alone recreates his home town of Pontito, Italy through his paintings. He has a nearly photographic, three-dimensional memory, but because of a strange illness that befell him when he was thirty-one, he cares only to re-create his Pontito, not the people or events, but the houses, the masonry, the stones, and he does so continually with microscopic and affecting detail.
The chapter "Prodigies," focuses on an autistic artist, Stephen Wiltshire, whom Sacks is determined to befriend and understand. In this tale, and the concluding tale, "An Anthropologist on Mars," Sacks helps us to penetrate the world of the autistic and see it (at least in my interpretation) as an alternate view of reality, a view with its own strengths and weaknesses, a world that is just as true and valid as the "normal" one. Of course severe autism is debilitating in the extreme, and even modest autism can permanently scar and alienate the autistic from society. Yet, perhaps that is society's loss. I even got the sense, in reading these concluding stories about autism, that perhaps theirs is an evolutionary "strategy" trying to emerge, that is, a different way of seeing and dealing with the world that also might work. I would not be shocked to discover some day that the autistic, with their sometimes extraordinary gifts of memory and concentration, are melded more completely and seamlessly into our usual consciousness, and that humankind is the better for it. Incidentally, the last tale about Temple Grandin, who is a professor of animal studies at Colorado State University, is remarkable because it is about an autistic who is completely integrated into the society, yet remains autistic. She is the one who says she sometimes feels, because of her different perspective, like "an anthropologist on Mars" when she views "normal" people. Sacks allows us to see why.
Bottom line: this is an extraordinary book of insight and scholarship about the human condition, written with grace and a deep sense of humanity, not to be missed.
|
|
|
|