Search -
An Anthropologist on Mars : Paradoxical Tales
An Anthropologist on Mars Paradoxical Tales Author:Oliver Sacks Neurological patients, Oliver Sacks once wrote, are travelers to unimaginable lands. An Anthropologist on Mars offers portraits of several such travelers -- including a surgeon consumed by the compulsive tics of Tourette's syndrome unless he is operating and a man who confronts the challenges of having his vision restored after more than forty y... more »ears of blindness.The exploration of these individual lives is not one that can be made in a consulting room or office, and Sacks has taken off his white coat and deserted the hospital, by and large, to join his subjects in their own environments. He feels, he says, in part like a neuroanthropologist, but most of all like a physician, summoned here and.there to make house calls, house calls at the far border of experience.In his lucid and compelling reconstructions of the mental acts we take for granted -- the act of seeing, the transport of memory, empathy for others -- Oliver Sacks provokes anew a sense of wonder at who we are.Oliver Sacks is the author of the bestselling titles The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Awakenings.An Anthropologist on Mars is available in hardcover from Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.« less