An Anthropologist on Mars PDF

An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales MP3 CD – Audiobook, MP3 Audio, Unabridged
Author: Visit ‘s Oliver Sacks Page ID: 1501279610

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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 Roueché 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 –This text refers to the Paperback edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Neurologist Sacks presents seven case studies of people whose “abnormalities” of brain function offer new insights into conceptions of human personality and consciousness.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

–This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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MP3 CDPublisher: Brilliance Audio; MP3 Una edition (August 18, 2015)Language: EnglishISBN-10: 1501279610ISBN-13: 978-1501279614 Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.5 x 6.8 inches Shipping Weight: 2.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies) Best Sellers Rank: #1,748,829 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #2427 in Books > Medical Books > Psychology > Neuropsychology #2939 in Books > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Psychology & Counseling > Neuropsychology #5191 in Books > Medical Books > Medicine > Internal Medicine > Neurology
These are true tales from a clinical neurologist’s notebook, but this isn’t just any neurologist. Oliver Sacks, author of the justly celebrated, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1986) and Awakenings (1973), which was later made into a movie starring Robert DeNiro and Robin Williams, and other works, is a gifted writer with a fine sense of story and an even finer sense of humanity. He has a style that is both affecting and fascinating, yet studiously objective, a style laced with footnotes and clinical observations, historical comparisons and wisdom. Part of the power of these tales, and of all of Sacks’s work, is his ability to be totally engaged and to identify with the subject while part of him is off to the side observing with scientific impartiality. This makes for a compelling read. If you’ve never read Sacks before, you are in for a very special treat.

These tales are paradoxical because "Defects, disorders, diseases" can bring out "latent powers, developments, evolutions, forms of life, that might never be seen or even be imaginable, in their absence." It is this "’creative’ potential, that forms the central theme of this book" (from Sacks’s Preface, page xvi).

The first tale, "The Case of the Colorblind Painter" is about a successful artist who worked in color all his life only to became colorblind at age sixty-five, and the effect this had on his life and work. The second, "The Last Hippie" is about an amnesiac man with a frontal lobe tumor that left him stranded in the sixties. Sacks tells this sad, pathetic story with vivid detail, and characteristically ends it with a footnote, a footnote of such warmth and genuine identification that we are moved to tears. (Don’t skip the footnotes!
"Anthropologist on Mars" begins with a quote by geneticist J.B.S. Haldane – a quote that so beautifullly sums up the book’s aim as to bear repeating:

"The universe is not only queerer than we imagine, but queerer than we can imagine."

Oliver Sacks’s seven paradoxical tales aim at showing us just that. We are offered a mere glimpse of the neurological pluriverse and, in so witnessing, become able to appreciate just how ‘queer’ human nature can be.

Other reviewers have gone into great detail about the outline of each story, so I will leave that to them. What I wish to point out to prospective readers is Sack’s ability, through his tales, to make the ordinary things about our brains that we take for granted, appear unique, fragile, and more special than we might have thought.

For instance, we witness two stories dealing with sight. First, we explore the case of a painter who loses ALL sense of color late in life. We also see its opposite – a blind man given sight late in life.

In the first case, we get a real sense of how integral the sense of color is for life. We watch this man describe how the world becomes infinitely duller and less interesting when all one can see is shades of gray. He is driven almost to suicide! In the next tale, we see how astonishingly hard it is to ‘learn to see’ and all the things the brain must do to achieve this (which becomes all the harder the older one is).

We also meet some folks who are autistic and, as such, lack the social instincts and abstraction that we who have them take for granted. Imagine, if you can, having to learn social rules (such things as body language, vocal inflection, and sense of humor) like one would learn algebra – not instinctually, but intellectually.

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