Dimensions
140 x 210 x 25mm
Dr Oliver Sacks offers us seven paradoxical tales - paradoxical because neurological disease can conduct one to other modes which, however abnormal they may be to our way of thinking, may develop virtues and beauties of their own. Here is a surgeon consumed by the complusive tics of Tourette's syndrome unless he is operating; an artist who loses all sense of colour in a car accident, but finds a new sensiblity and creative power in black and white; an autistic professor who cannot decipher the simplest social exchange between humans, but has built a career out of her intuitive undestanding of animal behaviour.
Sacks is a sympathetic clinician who uses his patients' problems as a launch pad for wider speculations about the nature of the mind...Sack's descriptions of these cases are both medical and literary. He writes with a moving directness and simplicity, his obvious sympathy acquitting him of any charge that he might be exploiting the misfortunes of others ..The final effect is wonder at the infinite variety of the human mind and experience.
