An Anthropologist On Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales by Oliver Sacks
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Book Reviews of An Anthropologist On Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales
Book Review: Insights into the Minds of Amazing People
Summary: 5 Stars
In An Anthropologist on Mars, Oliver Sacks provides intriguing insight into the lives of people existing in our world, but yet a world all their own. This is a book that should be read and enjoyed by anyone from neuroscience experts to a high school student thinking about a career in neuroscience to someone just looking for an enjoyable book.
I found this book extremely intriguing and hard to put down. While it did have some dry moments, these were sparse and only spanned a few pages. The seven case studies, each entirely different and never allowing the reader to become bored, were seamlessly molded together by Sacks confluent style of storytelling.
Case Studies:
The first case study, The Case of the Colorblind Painter, describes the life of an abstract painter, Mr. I, after a minor car accident disrupted his secondary visual cortex, rendering him totally colorblind. Sacks goes into fascinating details about how Mr. I, who once used vibrant colors in his paintings, now only sees the world in four shades of gray.
The Last Hippie describes rebellious young Greg who, while thought to be having a religious transformation to sainthood, actually has a massive midline tumor. This benign tumor has caused irreversible damage to Greg's vision, temporal lobes, pituitary gland, and diencephalons.
A Surgeon's Life describes the out-of-the ordinary life of Dr. Carl Bennett and how he thrives as a surgeon with Tourette's syndrome. Sacks even describes how surgery acts as a medication for Dr. Bennett's Tourettic impulses, "As soon as the flow of the operation resumes, the Tourette's, and Tourettic identity, vanishes once again." (p. 96)
To See and Not See is a case study of Virgil, a fifty-year-old man whose sight is restored after more than forty years in blindness. Sacks goes into depth about the physical and psychological consequences of what was expected to be a great enhancement in Virgil's life.
Pontito, a small Italian town, is the single focus of Franco Magnani's life. In The Landscape of His Dreams, Sacks illustrates the life of Magnani, an artist who paints nothing except the town of his childhood.
Prodigies is a case study of several autistic children and their amazing abilities. Sacks focuses on the artistic prodigal skills Stephen Wiltshire, a British boy who, at the age of five, began drawing detailed pictures using intricate perspectives.
An Anthropologist on Mars depicts the fascinating life of Temple Grandin, an autistic woman who has an amazing empathetic ability for animals. Sacks writes about his interactions with Temple as she shows him her "hug machine" and the cattle pen and ramp systems she has designed.
Style and Structure
The book is divided into seven chapters, each depicting the story of a unique individual, or sometimes multiple individuals. In each chapter, Sacks first presents the story of the patient in a manner that sucks you in and draws out questions about how and why the condition exists. He then goes into the scientific details surrounding the patient, providing the reader with the neuroscience background to better understand each case. Sacks includes pictures to allow the reader to better understand how the patients see and interact with the world.
Advantages
Sacks expertly balances the neuroscience facts with his captivating story-telling abilities. He intrigues the reader by describing an individual so unlike ourselves, creating interest in the neuroscience aspects of the patients lives. By "coating" scientific history and studies of neuroscience in the colorful aspects of the lives of colorblind artists or child prodigies, Sacks is likely able to draw in a wide audience to his field of expertise.
This book also goes into great detail about all aspects of the patients' lives that are affected by their neurological conditions. Sacks does not focus on the fairytale-type stories in which a treatment produced miraculous results. For instance, when describing the consequence of Virgil after the surgery that returned his sight, Sacks writes, "the business of adaptation - and, indeed, of life as he knew it - was suddenly cut across by a gratuitous blow of fate; an illness that, at a single stroke, deprived him of job, house, health, and independence." (p. 151)
Sacks forms a personal relationship with each of the patients he describes, allowing him to write about them with a clarity provided by the direct interactions. For instance, in Prodigies Stephen travels to the U.S. to visit Sacks at his home and the two travel to Venice and Amsterdam together. These interactions provide Sacks with a better understanding of his patents, so that he can better articulate the story of this amazing young artist to us, the readers.
Disadvantages
In an attempt to better describe the patients, Sacks often diverges on tangents about past patients or historical cases. While these diversions relate to the primary case study and are informative, they tended to distract me from the focus of the chapter. Such is the case when Sacks delves into a non-related personal aside about wanting to swim in an "exotic, remote lake." (p. 294) I also found the footnotes distracting, too excessive, and not always helpful or interesting. Though they did work to provide even more information, they more often served as a distraction.
Summary
This book is a fascinating introspective look into the lives of several individuals who live entirely different lives than the "normal" person. These intriguing case studies are simultaneously educational and enjoyable. Sacks does a fantastic job in his presentation of these people, thereby opening his world of neuroscience for the greater public benefit from. From beginning to end, I was fascinated by the introspective offered on every page.
Recommendation for Readers
Therefore, I would recommend interested readers order this book online. Because the case studies do not build on each other, they can be read them in any order desired or simply read only the studies that pose the greatest personal interest. However, once you get into one study and realize the intrigue that they offer, you will likely want to read the entire book.
Book Review: More of the fascinating same from Oliver Sacks
Summary: 4 Stars
Though I wouldn't recommend reading every single one of Sacks's books, because there's a lot of overlap, this is another good one with some fascinating, readable stories. Anyone interested in how the mind works and how it may NOT work should read it.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.
Book Review: amazingly inspirational
Summary: 5 Stars
AMAZING book. Hands down, one of my favorites!
The book is so incredibly inspirational! Everyone has a 'disability' one way or another, in this book, Sacks explores some of the extreme cases, and takes their life story to show how he/she has overcome with 'not being normal'. Sacks does a great job writing the book for people not in the medical field -- he takes the time to explain the situation without coming close to making the reader fall asleep.
I never get sick of this book. It is truly inspirational.
Book Review: Amazing
Summary: 5 Stars
This book introduces the reader to a collection of weird neurological conditions accompanied by stories and supplemental background information relating to each example. Its focus is on the stories of patients encountered by the author during the course of his career.
Sacks has a great eye for the details that make his characters interesting; his descriptions of his patients bizarre behavior are spot on. His tone is warm, friendly and has a touch of humor to it which I find most endearing. All of the stories are really page turners and I literally couldn't put this or its prequel (man who mistook his wife for a hat) down till I had devoured them both.
The other thing that makes this book amazing is the way sacks presents the background information for each of his cases. For example, the artist who lost the ability to see in color. Sacks does a great job of mixing case history with philosophy and physics in his efforts to explain how the human brain deals with color. The real art of this is that he manges to do it in the middle of the story without killing the readers interest.
Buy it now!