An Anthropologist On Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales

An Anthropologist On Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales
by Oliver Sacks

An Anthropologist On Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales
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Book Summary Information

Author: Oliver Sacks
Edition: Paperback
Published: 1996-02-13
ISBN: 0679756973
Number of pages: 327
Publisher: Vintage

Book Reviews of An Anthropologist On Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales

Book Review: Incredible experiences
Summary: 5 Stars

These are seven stories of people with some neurological aberration. These are all stories of real people, everyday difficulties, of denial & acceptance, of the indomitable human spirit.

A painter's colorful world goes gray with impeccable tonality. A monk revels in a Grateful Dead concert & has no memory of it the day after as he awaits his deceased father. An autistic child paints in breathtaking detail from memories that formed within seconds. A blind man cannot adjust to the gift of sight. A surgeon with tics; a painter compulsively obsessed with his childhood village.

These stories reveal the constant struggle against, in most cases, an unsurpassable odd. And yet, quite a few of them are about making the very best of this aberration, & translating what would be a handicap in a normal everyday world to a differentiating ability.

Sacks writes with sincerity & pathos.

Summary of An Anthropologist On Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales

The works of neurologist Oliver Sacks have a special place in the swarm of mind-brain studies. He has done as much as anyone to make nonspecialists aware of how much diversity gets lumped under the heading of "the human mind."

The stories in An Anthropologist on Mars are medical case reports not unlike the classic tales of Berton Rouech? in The Medical Detectives. Sacks's stories are of "differently brained" people, and they have the intrinsic human interest that spurred his book Awakenings to be re-created as a Robin Williams movie.

The title story in Anthropologist is that of autistic Temple Grandin, whose own book Thinking in Pictures gives her version of how she feels--as unlike other humans as a cow or a Martian. The other minds Sacks describes are equally remarkable: a surgeon with Tourette's syndrome, a painter who loses color vision, a blind man given the ambiguous gift of sight, artists with memories that overwhelm "real life," the autistic artist Stephen Wiltshire, and a man with memory damage for whom it is always 1968.

Oliver Sacks is the Carl Sagan or Stephen Jay Gould of his field; his books are true classics of medical writing, of the breadth of human mentality, and of the inner lives of the disabled. --Mary Ellen Curtin


To these seven narratives of neurological disorder Dr. Sacks brings the same humanity, poetic observation, and infectious sense of wonder that are apparent in his bestsellers Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. These men, women, and one extraordinary child emerge as brilliantly adaptive personalities, whose conditions have not so much debilitated them as ushered them into another reality.

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