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Summary: A Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat?!
Review: OK, it does have a funny title but I find this book very interesting and easy to read. It's lyout is one factor of that, for it is divided into tales so you can pick up this book, finish a chapter and pick it up again days later. I am a Psychology minor and therefore I thought it was in my best interest to read it. This book gives us tales of abnormal patients that attain very unusual mental disorders. From an old man who kept kicking himself out of bed to someone who "lost" their left side of the body, this is real world stuff that happends to real world people. If you're interested in Psychology or Abnormal Psychology I really reccomend this book.
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Summary: A touchstone book
Review: "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" suggests a theatrical image from Ionesco, or perhaps a brightly illustrated volume shelved next to "If You Give a Moose a Muffin." And yet this book is far from absurdity or fantasy: It describes actual neurological dysfunctions, and the title captures the human dimension of these afflictions -- personal, puzzling, embarrassing, disabling, alienating and, yes, even funny. With his combination of clinical expertise, compassionate insight and comfortable prose, Dr. Oliver Sacks ("Awakenings" and "An Anthropologist on Mars") is the perfect guide to this unusual investigation. On one level his case studies are fascinating glimpses of the complex -- and fragile -- circuitry that must be integrated to produce "normal" brain function, and they illustrate how isolated deficits can have life-transforming impact. But Sacks is more interested in people than in diagnoses, and he introduces us to vivid personalities whose responses and adaptations are often inventive and unpredictable, and whose individual circumstances often evade conventional wisdom. There is the title character, who learns to sing himself through his day after he loses the capability to connect visual imagery with interpretive categories. Sacks sympathetically describes the savant brothers who are perfectly content communicating privately through prime numbers, but who are deprived of joy when therapeutic protocol pushes them into "normal" life. And then there's the man with Tourette's Syndrome for whom the physical and verbal tics are either a burden or a blessing, depending on the day of the week. Every once in awhile a book comes along that becomes a touchstone, a standard source of reference and perspective in daily life, a dependable source of insight and inspiration. "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" may become that for you, as it has for me.
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Summary: The brain plays the tune, and we dance in the music.
Review: This book is a very fun, enlightening, and interesting read for those interested in curious human stories, the way the brain functions (and malfunctions), general neurology, and those who simply like an interesting series of unusual human anecdotes of everyday life. It is the sort of general genre of the movie Rain Man, in which Tom Cruise plays a person who has an autistic brother (Dustin Hoffman) who, whilst poor in some mental functions, can also do amazing things with numbers and memory. In fact, some of the material in this book was directly incorporated into the above movie. The book includes examples of brain disorders such as a man who couldn't tell the difference between his wife and a hat, people who think one of their limbs is not their own, people who can't remember what happened more than 5 minutes or so prior to the present, people who have amnesia, people who think it is 1945, people who are autistic, people who have difficulty recognising faces, people with epilepsy and its various forms, and why these things occur in the brain in the first place. Some of the sufferers are otherwise normal people, highly intelligent, and curiously enough, often musical. One particularly interesting piece concerns some who suffer from autism and have unusual ability in aspects of memory and mathematics. They can 'see', for example 111 matches on a floor and know this number from a brief glance, but can't multiply 10 by 12. This phenomenon has been well documented, although how their brain does this, is not understood. They can calculate what day September 12 546 AD was in seconds but can't add of multiply simple numbers. It is suggested that their minds exist in an array of infinite numbers, and so instead of seeing objects, they see numbers. '111' just comes into their head *automatically*, the same way 'a lot of matches on the floor' comes into most people, or something like that. The stories are fun, peculiar, and entertaining. Good for dinner parties, or just those who are curious about this brain of ours.
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Summary: Long remembered
Review: This is another of my favorite books. I read it over 10 years ago and the individuals in the book still come back to my mind occasionally. This book made me think. For example, the lady in her 80's who started tooking lasciviously at young men again stands in my mind as a paradigm for how our 'settings' influence the way we see things; the same thing may look beautiful one day and blah the next. Or the man with the short term memory loss who was shocked when he looked in the mirror made me ponder on how the faculty of memory is necessary for giving us a sense of self. The book was easy to read and Sacks draws almost schematic representations of these people, but I believe that oversimplification is often necessary in order to make a valid point.
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Summary: A Deeply Spiritual Book
Review: I first encountered the essay "Rebecca" (one of the fine "clinical tales" in Sacks's book)in a Norton Anthology I used in a writing course. In this essay, Sacks describes his encounter with a young girl on a park bench outside the hospital. Later, he encounters her in a clinical setting as a patient, and has a different view of her. His clinical methodology uncovers her deficits; his challenge is to see past them to the whole spiritual being he saw sitting on a park bench transfixed with the beauty of spring. That he is able to do so refocuses his attitudes toward his other patients, for what he sees in Rebecca, he now "saw in them all." For me what was most interesting about these fascinating stories is that the underlying question has to do less with cures for bizarre neurological diseases, than with the essential question of what makes us who we are, and what do we do when our entire concept of self is savaged and the world left unrecognizable? For Sacks, at least part of the answer lies in art--the narrative in the synagogue that knits Rebecca's deficits and makes her whole (holy?); the music that enables some patients who are unable even to walk without difficulty, the ability to dance; the notes that enable stutterers to sing. This is a wonderful book that does what wonderful books do--it makes the reader look again at what he only thought he saw before, and see it whole.
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Summary: What a fantastic thing the brain is
Review: In this book we are first presented with case stories of patients that more or less convince you that the brain is a kind of mechanical contraption. Strange things happens when parts of this contraption is damaged. These stories of loss are interesting and puts you in awe: What a fantastic thing the brain is! But there is more. The story about the [twins] left me baffled. With an IQ of 60 they couldn't do simple additions or subtractions. And certainly they couldn't do multiplications or divisions. But nevertheless their brains could somehow master 20 digits primes. Without using any "methods" they could somehow "sense" whether such an enormous number was a prime or not. This twin story alone makes the book worthwhile. -Simon
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Summary: Learn about a complex subject in an interesting way
Review: If you ever wanted to learn more about unusual neurological disorders, but were afraid to be buried in dry research papers and journals, here is a book for you. From a distance, this is just a collection of detailed case histories about different neurological disorders. Up close, it is high-quality biographical prose that gives the reader a real feel for what it might be like to have each of the disorders. We're not talking about symptom lists and treatment regimens, but everyday life for a person with autism (or one of the other disorders covered). Overall, this book is a work of art. Almost as good, albeit slightly dry in places, is "An Anthropologist on Mars" by Sacks. I am a practicing clinical psychologist and, when I begin working with a client newly diagnosed with a disorder covered in one Sacks's books, I usually ask them to read the relevant chapters. They almost always come back to me and say, "Yeah, that's it exactly!" What better praise is there?
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Summary: A little book about a big subject.
Review: Oliver Sacks is a Clinical Professor of Neurology, and many of his patients have had brain disorders that have manifested themselves in bizarre and often surprising ways.This book is a collection of stories about some of these patients and the profound effect the brain disorders have had on their lifes, and ways of thinking.The stories are in turn traumatic,funny,sad,and often unbelievable,more suited to sci-fi than a medical journal.The chapters are an easy read for your average layman but the postscripts that follow these chapters are full of medical jargon that only medical students or doctors can appreciate. This book made me think about the grey matter between my ears in a different light, and also of how little we know about this complex organ that makes us what we are.The only downside to this book was the author's theological ramblings.
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Summary: CASE STUDIES IN HUMANITY
Review: Having read this book for the first time 7 years ago in college, I recently found myself brousing through it again, and before I knew it I had reread the whole thing. It was even better than the first time. Sacks has added some valuable post scripts since my first reading, but the meat of the book remains the same. Sacks relays some of his more interesting individual cases with clinical and human detail. The result is a book that is more than just stories of neuropsychological abnormalities. He engages the reader in a philosophical questioning of "What makes a man a man" or more importantly, "What is the essence of the soul". While sacks does not pretend to be a theological expert, he does show the emotional aspects of clients whose cases were thought to be void of emotion in the first place. Those without a background in psychology will still find this book a moving read. The reader will without a doubt walk away with an appreciation for many aspects of life previously taken for granted. Through his accounts, Sacks gives glimpses of what it would be like to have no memory, no language, no smell, or even no motor skills without intense concentration. Only sacks can make accounts of autism, amnesia, and tourette's this interesting. The book may lag a little for those with absolutely no background in psychology. There is more than a fare share of medical and psychological jargon. However, Sacks more than makes up for this with his ability to tell a tale. A highly enjoyable book.
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Summary: Interesting to a Point
Review: The title of this book attracted my attention to it. What was this book? Well, it is a collection of case histories of patients who treated with Dr. Sacks. His speciality, people with nuerological damages. (Brain Injuries.) This book is interesting, in that, it exposed me to ideas and injuries I never heard about, let have seen discussed, in any other context. For example, the title refers to a man whose brain could not recognize faces. It never occurred to me that a face is a collecton of images that your brain "puts together" and makes into a face. This man could recognize his brother, for example, only because his brother had a large mole. So, for interesting cases, this book is great. As a pleasant read, because it is a collection of case histories, the stories tend to be short and, for me, they became a little boring after you get over the freaky factor of the cases. The cases also seem to overlap somewhat. If one was reading this for medical information, on the other hand, I would tend to think it is not accurate or detailed enough to be of any great use. I don't know, I am not a doctor. I am, for purposes of this document, a critic. And, in that capacity, I would warn you away from this book, unless you have a special interest in these types of cases or you like to read about the strange or the unususal. For me, I felt a little queasy reading these cases, after awhile, because I was getting entertainment by reading about the misforturnates of others so explicitly explained. (There are some amusing cases, but they are the exception)
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