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Loading... The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Talesby Oliver Sacks
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. Fascinating read for anyone interested in dysfunction in the brain! (  ) erinbearlina | Oct 2, 2009 |  Re-hash of existing material. He sure does like rhetoric. (  ) simondavies | Sep 30, 2009 | I first read this book aged 18, and was amazed...beautifully written and compassionate, it highlights the fragility of the human brain and psyche. Fantastic read. ( ) lexileven | Sep 14, 2009 | A Fascinating Read : A neurologist, Oliver Sacks, discussed and brought to light the neurological disorders in case by case in this book with an interesting choice of the title: "Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat." This is the first book by Sacks that I have read, and I found his writing style to be quite enjoyable. Not only that, this book contains an extraordinary collection of cases of individuals with neurological disorders that brings one to understand a bit on how human brain works. While this book was first published in the early 1970s and the understanding of the human brain mechanism has changed and increased since then, I found this book to be very insightful. Out of all the cases I have read from this book, I found the following cases (or stories) to be of great interest to me: "Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat," "The Man Who Fell Out of Bed," "Witty Ticcy Ray," "Cupid's disease," and "The Autist Artist." This book is a fascinating read and deeply recommended. iayork | Aug 9, 2009 | This book is a collection of "case studies" describing how a range of neurological conditions affect the brain and people's behaviours. Sacks is a neurologist, so one can assume the cases are accurately portrayed. On the one hand, this book could be regarded as a fascinating insight into brain diseases and disorders. On the other,it could be regarded as a professional person,exploiting the distressing situations in which some of his patients found themselves to add to his probably already substantial income, and to satisfy the voyeuristic curiosity of the broader public. I'm in the second camp. I wonder how the patients would have felt, seeing themselves and their distressing conditions so publicly portrayed. For me, this book overstepped the ethical line. It was written to be entertaining about a subject that shouldn't be entertaining. I found it to be exploitative and distasteful. (  ) barbaretta | Jul 10, 2009 | 
 In addition to possessing the technical skills of a 20th-century doctor, the London-born Dr. Sacks, a professor of clinical neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, sees the human condition like a philosopher-poet. The resultant mixture is insightful, compassionate, moving and, on occasion, simply infuriating. One could call these essays neurological case histories, and correctly so, although Dr. Sacks' own expression -''clinical tales'' - is far more apt. Dr. Sacks tells some two dozen stories about people who are also patients, and who manifest strange and striking peculiarities of perception, emotion, language, thought, memory or action. And he recounts these histories with the lucidity and power of a gifted short-story writer.  The book deserves to be widely read whether for its message, or as an easy introduction to neurological symptoms, or simply as a collection of moving tales. The reader should, however, bring to it a little scepticism, for outside Sack's clinic, things do not always fall out quite so pat.
Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0684853949, Paperback)In his most extraordinary book, "one of the great clinical writers of the 20th century" (The New York Times) recounts the case histories of patients lost in the bizarre, apparently inescapable world of neurological disorders. Oliver Sacks's The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat tells the stories of individuals afflicted with fantastic perceptual and intellectual aberrations: patients who have lost their memories and with them the greater part of their pasts; who are no longer able to recognize people and common objects; who are stricken with violent tics and grimaces or who shout involuntary obscenities; whose limbs have become alien; who have been dismissed as retarded yet are gifted with uncanny artistic or mathematical talents.If inconceivably strange, these brilliant tales remain, in Dr. Sacks's splendid and sympathetic telling, deeply human. They are studies of life struggling against incredible adversity, and they enable us to enter the world of the neurologically impaired, to imagine with our hearts what it must be to live and feel as they do. A great healer, Sacks never loses sight of medicine's ultimate responsibility: "the suffering, afflicted, fighting human subject." (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:57:52 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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