Publication Date:February 13, 1996 Availability:Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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ISBN13: 9780679756972
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Amazon.com Review 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
Product Description 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.
excellent cases to learnJuly 1, 2010 PRASANTA GHOSH an excellent description of real cases which makes you think about the gigantic human power!
anthropologyFebruary 11, 2010 R. Cuna(BROOKLYN, NY, US) 0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I wasn't so sure if this book was the one my teacher wanted. Luckily it is. It did its purpose. Good book for a cheap rpice.
Seven case studies that don't disappoint!December 7, 2009 Siddharth Tantia(Georgia, USA) 2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Sacks writing style and philosophy in this book is best described by a quote in the beginning of the book, "Ask not what disease the person has, but rather what person the disease has" (William Osler). Sacks does not look at simply the pathological and physiological way that the disease affects the individual but how the individual reacts to the disorder and how, in each of these cases, they retain their own sense of self despite what the disease/disorder does to them.
Unlike his earlier book, "The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat," Sacks does not just throw a barrage of patients with neurological disorders at the reader, but rather goes through the lives of seven patients and observes them in their natural life. He presents not only their disorder, but how it affects their daily life, how their perception of the world is different, and the creative ways that they have come up to deal with their disorder.
BRIEF SYNOPSIS WITH COMMENTARY
There are seven cases presented in this book:
Case 1 - The Case of the Colorblind Painter
This case talks about the predicament of a painter who after sixty five years had an accident which robbed him entirely of his color vision. A man, who had had a distinguished career as an artist with numerous vividly colored paintings and abstractions in his studio, could no longer even imagine color.
The painter eventually accepted his predicament and started to paint black-and-white representations instead of dwelling on the loss of his ability to paint in color. As Sacks explains, "...a revision was occurring, so that as his former color world and even the memory of it became fainter and died inside him, a whole new world of seeing, of imagination, of sensibility, was born" (40).
Case 2 - The Last Hippie
This case tells the tale of Greg, a hippie in the 1960s, who due to a number of unfortunate circumstances lived with an undiagnosed brain tumor for a number of years. Due to this tumor, he went blind, developed amnesia, and essentially became sort of "dead inside." Sacks focuses here not on the disorder itself but on the few instances of humanity and feeling he saw in him. For instance, Sacks writes about the time he observed Greg claiming that he had "lost something" after his father died - even though he would forget his father died, minutes after being told.
Case 3 - A Surgeon's Life
This account is about a surgeon who is inflicted with Tourette's, a disorder which causes uncontrollable tics. Oddly enough, he is still able to practice as his disorder does not occur when he is extremely focused.
Case 4 - To See and Not See
This case is about Virgil, a blind man who regained his vision but did not know how to see. He did not know that he was looking at a face, could not focus on anything etc. Sacks writes a lot about the philosophical and neurological implications of this - how we cannot just use our senses but have to learn how to use them. Unlike the other cases thus far, Virgil did not adapt as one would think to this miraculous restoration of eyesight. Virgil ended up losing his eyesight again, maybe because his fragile retinas were suddenly exposed to light and were burned out. In the end, he was relieved to be completely blind and rely again on the other senses (touch, smell etc) that he had honed over the years of his blindness.
Case 5 - The Landscape of his Dreams
In this case, Sacks talks about an artist, Franco, who perfectly remembered his childhood hometown and was able to draw it with photographic detail. However, his childhood memories were a curse and he neither talk nor draw anything else. Sacks talks about what may cause this, but in the end is unable to offer a cure.
Case 6 - Prodigies
In this section, Sacks writes about idiot savants and the autism that they usually suffer from. He discusses more than one example of these savants, but fixates on Stephen, a famous autistic artist at the age of thirteen.While Sacks is writing about Stephen the autistic artist, he muses: "Was not art, quintessentially, an expression of a person vision, a self? Could one be an artist without having a "self"?"(203). I believe that this philosophical point really cuts to the heart of this novel - are these people defined by their disorders or do they define their disorders, that is, is the disorder part of what they fundamentally are?
Case 7 - An Anthropologist on Mars
Finally, Sacks talks about the case that he named his book after. He talks about Temple Gardin who suffers from autism and feels like an "anthropologist on Mars" due to her severe social impairment, for instance, she cannot understand complex emotions and body language. The most astonishing part of her story was not her autism and her social impairment but how she was able to turn her emotional connection to animals into a job as a designer for animal management systems. Temple was even able to talk about the deep philosophical meaning that she believes her work has and how she wants to leave a positive legacy behind for others to follow - proving that her disorder had not entirely robbed her of her unique personality and humanity (as was the case with every other patient discussed in this book)
Each of these cases was selected by Sacks to illustrate a how a person's life was affected by a devastating neurological disorder but more importantly how that person dealt with it. Each case looks at how the person interacted with the disease rather than how the disease interacted with the person and explains many of the scientific underpinnings that explain the positive or just self-correcting changes in their life that the people with these disorders were able to make. My only real critique is that sometimes, Sacks makes references to patients he discussed in other books that other readers may not have read, and there is not enough context for the reader to fully understand these references.
RECOMMENDATION
This was one of the few nonfiction books I have read that was hard to put down. Because all of the obscure references that may throw readers off are actually mentioned in Sacks' other book "The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat," I recommend reading that before picking this one up. I did think out of all the Sacks books I have read that this one of the best - always detailed enough to give a clear picture of each patient but short enough to hold the reader's interest. I highly recommend this book to anyone from the layperson to the neuroscientist (though the layperson may have to look up a few terms)!
Reviewing a bookDecember 1, 2009 Anita W. Asbell I needed the book for a class. It was not my usual read, but not bad. Appreciate the speediness of the delivery.
Great book of choice to gain more personable insight on neurological disordersSeptember 27, 2009 Hsuan Chen(Atlanta, GA) `An Anthropologist on Mars' by Oliver Sacks is a great book for those interested in gaining a more personable insight on patients with neurological disorders. The book was a great read for biology nerds like me, providing both entertainment values as well as satisfying my geeky needs to learn about more about abnormality of human beings. It not only describes the clinical importance of these neurological diseases, but it also expressed the thoughts of the subjects through a description of their interviews, life stories, and day-to-day life.
The book was composed of seven independent case studies condone by Sacks with or without the help of his fellow colleagues. The first case was the study of a color blind painter who lost his ability to perceive colors after a car accident. The artist's inner struggles as well as his efforts/attempts to restore his color-associated abilities were recorded almost in a style that is first-person, as if the artist is speaking to the readers directly. There was also detailed explanation of the history and study of the color-blind as well as the current debates on how colors are perceived in the brain in which Sacks passively showed his stance through the experiments he had performed on the artist.
The second case, titled `The Last Hippie' described a case of individual loosing short-term memory and the ability to accumulate memory due to a lesion in the frontal lobe of the brain as a result of a tumor. I feel that this case had the least personal insight to the mind of the patients out of all the cases within this book; however, this is most likely due to the patient's inability to retain memory, causing him to be insensitive to what had happened to him, even the fact that he is blind or has an disorder. Nevertheless, because of the lacking of this aspect in this section, the case of `The Last Hippie' I felt was the most incomplete in this book, and left me lingering and unable to make a conclusion out of this case.
The third case, titled `A surgeon's Life' described an extraordinary case of a surgical doctor with Tourette's syndrome, whom, despises his uncontrollable tics and urges, is able to perform surgery with steady hands and total concentration for as long as 3 hours. I was very intrigued by this story, because it had deepened my understanding of Tourette's. The way Sacks wrote this section of the book reminded me of an episode MTV's television show - Real Life - I have Tourettes. Much like the TV show, it gave the firsthand account from the point of view of the patient; however, because the subject in Sacks book possess so much more medical knowledge and abilities than any of the TV show's subjects, I was able to obtain more medical insight of the disease as well as a theory of Tourette's developed by someone who actually has the disorder.
The fourth case, `To See and Not See' described the struggles of a blind person who had suddenly been `blessed' by vision. While a normal sighted person may believe that giving a blind person `sight' should be a pleasant gift, but that is almost never the case in a blind man's perspective. It seems to me that not only does `sight' not help the blinds to facilitate life functions, it even serves as the source of many difficulties and stress for the blinds.
The Fifth case described a painter who obsessively painted his childhood home because of uncontrollable psychic seizures that force him to live in his memories. This section for me was particularly dull; while there was ample first-person account from the subject itself, there was a lack of reference to other cases with similar characteristics. Eventually, the words of the subject became repetitive and I yearned to move on to the next section.
The Sixth and seventh case examined cases of gifted individuals with autism; one with a photographic memory and can draw anything by memory who eventually was also discovered to be a musical savant, the other a talented engineer who seemingly has the social skills which often are lacked in autistic individuals. The talented engineer, who described herself as `an anthropologist on Mars', reminded me greatly of the character Bones, from the TV series `Bones'. Both are tremendously intelligent, yet only able to perform semi normal social interactions through logics, not emotions.
Within each case, Sacks gave his account of the situation of the patient, then, when possible, he gave the situation in the words of his patients. For me, that was very important because it gave me room to interpret whether if I agree with Sacks on his theory or not. Then, to aid his readers in interpreting the case for themselves, Sacks provided relevant literature and past researches that helped explain the disorder, presented theories, or drew similarities between the subject and other patients with similar disorders.
It is the personal aspect of the stories that really astonished me - I have read papers, books, and articles on the majority of the disorders in the book, but I have never had the chance to know patients with these disorders on a personal level; Sacks gave his reader a chance to know the disorders in a more intimate level, as if the reader is getting to know the patient while in the process of reading the book.
It was obvious that Sacks made a tremendous effort to get to know his subject as a person, not as the case of their disorder, in order to give his readers a more intimate perspective on these cases. For example, in a letter Sacks wrote to a friend, he said " ...I have seen something of his odd skills and defects - I have yet to see him as a mind and person. Perhaps a week of being with him will show me this." when describing the autistic prodigy of drawing and music. It turned out that not only did he spend a week with his subject, he seemingly had tried to build a relationship with his subject and gave the autistic prodigy more visits afterwards. Sacks' care for these subjects also seeped through unintentionally and was expressed covertly in the book. For example, after taking the `last hippie' to the concert of his favorite band, Sacks gave this account "...I feared that if I stopped playing the Dead, or talking about them, for a single moment, all memory of the concert would go from his mind." As a result, there was a genuine sense of disappointment from Sacks when, the next morning, the `last hippie' does not recall the concert, in which he had indeed described as `the time of his life'.
I would strongly recommend this book to people who are interested in seeing the disorders in a different perspective. However, I would not recommend people with no biological/neurological background to read this book. Although the cases themselves are interesting, but it takes some basic knowledge of neurology to appreciate the literature references that Sacks had imbedded in the book. Without this appreciation of literature, the readers cannot make any sort of conclusion for themselves, and the book becomes something like the MTV's Real Life - a mere account of the life of people with these diseases.
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