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Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain 69 reviews
Oliver Sacks
Knopf, 2007
Sachsophonia
The great Oliver Sachs turns his attention to neurological disturbances related to the hearing of Music. In the course of it he shows that what I suspect most of us take for granted, that we all share a basic single way of 'hearing music' to be wrong. He shows that the listening to Music is an enormously complex neurological process involving different areas of the brain. And in chronicling a ...
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Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind 92 reviews
V. S. Ramachandran, Sandra Blakeslee
Harper Perennial, 1999
Absolutely Fantastic Book
While this book may not be for everyone, I believe that most people will have a hard time putting it down. Ramachandran's ability to explain absurdly complicated concepts with simple language and simple methods is just one of the facets of his genius. After readking Phantoms I burned through at least 4 other books he wrote, but still Phantoms is by far the best.
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A Journey Round My Skull (New York Review Books Classics)3 reviews
Frigyes Karinthy
NYRB Classics, 2008
The view from the outside in
In the spring of 1936, Frigyes (Frederic) Karinthy, a popular Hungarian poet, heard locomotives rumbling, reverberating, dying away. He knew there had been no trains on the streets of Budapest for 40 years. After long, exhaustive examinations Budapest neurologists told him that an egg-sized cyst webbed with tiny blood vessels was sprouting on the right side of his brain, back of his cerebellum. ...
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Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood59 reviews
Oliver Sacks
Vintage, 2002
I wish all children were introduced to science like this!
Sigh...as a science educator who sees students turned off of science in spite of it being much more interesting and useful then English and history, it's frustrating to read about a child whose family managed to convey the fun of science. I've enjoyed Oliver Sacks books so much. He is such a great person, a great neurologist, a great writer who manages to introduce the world to his scientific ...
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The Richness of Life: The Essential Stephen Jay Gould4 reviews
Stephen Jay Gould
W. W. Norton, 2007
Love is a many spandreled thing
Anyone familiar with Gould will immediately understand and appreciative my little quip of a title. Stephen J Gould remains the quintessential scientist - a thirst for knowledge, an original thinker, king of the scientific essay for the layman, a genius in multiple areas. Yet he was also involved in the details of everyday life - he was a family man who loved singing in great choirs, he quoted ...
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Awakenings21 reviews
Oliver Sacks
Vintage, 1999
The book version of the movie
I saw the movie called AWAKENINGS (with Robt. DeNiro and Robin Williams) and was intrigued, so I bought this book by Sachs. I was not disappointed. The book is so much more thorough than the movie , and I must say...much more technical.
Infact, the book is so technical that it could take the reader quite a while to decipher all the medical terms included & to read the entire book quickly. ...
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Migraine27 reviews
Oliver Sacks
Vintage, 1999
Pictures of the mother of all headaches
I read this book a few years ago when my irregular migraine attacks had become more frequent. I had them from about age 15 until now, for the first decades maybe once or twice per year, then for a while more often, now less often and less severe. It took me decades to have a name for this thing at all. I have moved about so often that I never saw one medical doctor often enough to get so specific ...
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An Anthropologist On Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales45 reviews
Oliver Sacks
Vintage, 1996
Amazing
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 ...
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Seeing Voices15 reviews
Oliver Sacks
Vintage, 2000
"...the deaf have something to teach us."
In this extraordinary study, Dr. Sacks gives the general reader a penetrating insight into the world of the deaf. In his acclaimed "The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat", as a practicing neurologist, he brought his readers into the bizarre world of terrible brain related illnesses, presenting twenty-four cases of individuals afflicted with such diseases as agnosia or prosopagnosia, where ...
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The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales101 reviews
Oliver Sacks
Touchstone, 1998
Extremely Helpful
This book has helped me in so many ways to understand the human mind. I can't say enough about this book, except to tell people to buy it.
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The Man with a Shattered World: The History of a Brain Wound2 reviews
A.R.Luria
Harvard University Press, 2004
Fascinating and moving, by a hero of Oliver Sacks
I learned about this book from Oliver Sacks; he's often mentioned Luria as a hero and cited this book as an example of what he's trying to do. It is a case study--collaboration between doctor and patient--of a man who suffered severe effects from a brain injury incurred during the Second World War; he's lost most of his memory, including his education and how to do the simplest things; however ...
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Uncle Tungsten 2 reviews
Oliver Sacks
Picador, 2002
A fascinating tour of the Periodic Kingdom
"It often happens that the mind of a person who is learning a new science, has to pass through all the phases which the science itself has exhibited in its historical evolution." (Stanislao Cannizzaro, Italian chemist, 1826 - 1910).
These words had a powerful resonance for Oliver Sacks. When the gifted neurologist wrote his autobiography, he also wrote a history of chemistry as recapitulated ...
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Oaxaca Journal (National Geographic Directions)10 reviews
Oliver Sacks
National Geographic, 2005
Mispickel! Orpiment! Realgar!
Dr. Sacks accompanied a group of botanical friends on a trip to see, catalogue, draw, and take delight in the unparalleled variety of ferns in Oaxaca, Mexico. His resulting journal is a meditation on Zapotec culture, amateur naturalists, edible insects, psychedelics, and above all ferns: seemingly so fragile yet having survived, with little change, for over 300 million years.
According to the ...
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The Man Who Forgot How to Read: A Memoir
Howard Engel
Thomas Dunne Books, 2008
The remarkable journey of an award-winning writer struck with a rare and devastating affliction that prevented him from reading even his own writing One hot midsummer morning, novelist Howard Engel picked up his newspaper from his front step and discovered he could no longer read it. The letters had mysteriously jumbled themselves into something that looked like Cyrillic one moment and Korean the next. While he slept, Engel had experienced a ...
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The Best American Science Writing 2003 (Best American Science Writing)5 reviews
Oliver Sacks
Harper Perennial, 2003
Delightful Range of Essays on Current Topics
This is a great collection of issues and debates in science that those of us out of the field -- or even involved in other research fields -- will find interesting. They're as clearly written as editor Oliver Sacks' works and each has at least one topical issue to catch the reader's interest. Some have several.
Each story has something fascinating about it:
* "The Forest Primeval" tells ...
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The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales1 review
Oliver Sacks
Simon & Schuster, 2006
Read it because I had to and totally loved it
I first bumped into this book in my college English class as part of the required reading. The first story, which is the story from which the book derives its title, is about a music teacher who got so good at looking at the details, his brain could no longer focus on the large picture.
Each story is about Oliver Sacks' interactions with different people who have there own neurological ...
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An Anthropologist on Mars
Oliver Sacks
MacMillan, 1998
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The Island of the Colorblind29 reviews
Oliver Sacks
Vintage, 1998
A mini-vacation for the scientifically curious
I had not read Sacks before and was laid up in the Peninsula hospital in Burlingame. This book was lingering on the shelf at home and I had my wife bring it to me. Soon the beige walls and IV tubes dissapeared and I was fighting the humidity of the tropical south pacific. This book reads like a travelogue, a report on achromatopsia (congenital colorblindness), the lytico-bodig (an ...
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A Leg to Stand On14 reviews
Oliver Sacks
Touchstone, 1998
Journey of Healing.
I should stress from the start that this book is extremely well written. It requires a special talent to combine scientific, clinical prose with personal, emotional and philosophical insight. This book is remarkable on many counts, but its value lies in Sacks' honesty, uninhibited rendering of the personal, by and while incorporating his desire to see his profession, neurology and psycho ...
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Vintage Sacks4 reviews
Oliver Sacks
Vintage, 2004
All of Mankind is enriched by this man's work
I have read a good share of Oliver Sacks books. I share completely the view of one excellent Amazon reviewer who spoke about Sack's special gift for understanding others. His great brilliance and originality in thought combine with a tremendous capacity for listening to, and observing others while respecting them for what they are. His researches seem to thus add a dimension to our sense of the ...
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