An Anthropologist On Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales
An Anthropologist On Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales Books
- ISBN13: 9780679756972
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- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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.Amazon.com Review
The works of neurologist Oliver Sacks have a unique 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 below the heading of “the human mind.”
The tales in An Anthropologist on Mars are medical case reports not unlike the classic tales of Berton Roueché in The Medical Detectives. Sacks’s tales are of “differently brained” people, and they have the intrinsic human interest that spurred his book Awakenings to be re-made as a Robin Williams movie.
The title tale in Anthropologist is that of autistic Temple Grandin, whose own book Thought 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 general practitioner with Tourette’s syndrome, a painter who loses color thought, 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 hurt for whom it is everlastingly 1968.
Oliver Sacks is the Carl Sagan or Stephen Jay Gould of his field; his books are right classics of medical writing, of the breadth of human mentality, and of the inner lives of the disabled. –Mary Ellen Curtin
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Although I don’t agree with many of Oliver Sacks’s conclusions, I found this fascinating book a worthwhile read. It is packed with superior case material – and largely presented in a very readable format (and unlike in some of his other books, he joystick in his footnotes!). Some of the chapters, like “Prodigies” or “An Anthropologist On Mars” or “To See Or Not To See,” are downright brilliant and provide wonderful and unusual insights into the workings of the human brain – and the universals of human experience. Other chapters (such as “The Colorblind Painter” and “The Landscape Of His Dreams”) are weak and drag on, rehashing the same relatively minute points ad nauseum.
Overall, but, Sacks’s main weakness is his lack of understanding of emotions, particularly the emotional dynamics between parents and children. He does occasionally wax eloquent about emotional states and spirituality, but this comes across more as an intellectualization of emotions than a truly deep grasp of them. He has small respect for their power to mold neurological development, and sidesteps his own data that top in this direction. To me this is shoddy science, and he failed to convince me of his foregone conclusion that disorders like autism and Tourette’s syndrome are neurological in origin.
In his chapter on Tourette’s, Sacks presents a general practitioner who appears to be acting out a huge degree of repressed hostility through his unconsciously motivated peculiarities. Sacks even opens the door a crack into why the general practitioner might do it – that he was adopted and painfully isolated as a child, and it’s not hard to speculate that he might be really enraged at his rotten lot in early childhood life, and yet unable to express this apt rage through healthy avenues of expression, because that would only earn him MORE rejection. So instead (my gut tells me, though I lack the data to take it further) he acted it out through Tourette’s. But Sacks never touches this one with a ten foot pole, or even speculates as to this possibility, and instead just idealizes this man for his bizarre outbursts, his violence, his hostility toward his own children, his terrible boundaries, and his occasional ability to rein in his symptoms and function super-normally. Had the general practitioner not been so high functioning, and people not place up with his oddness and general impoliteness, I highly doubt Sacks would be putting him on such a pedestal.
But I really question Sacks’s confidence in stating that autism has nothing to do with childhood trauma. My gut tells me that at least some autistic children were emotionally traumatized in early childhood or in the womb, and were reacting on a primal level to their mothers’ emotional pathology. Every fetus reacts to maternal emotional pathology – and emotional health – at some level, and I feel the autistic response is just an ultra-extreme one, like the crème de la crème of a schizoid response, so much so that the parts of the fetal brain that develop healthy emotional relating and expression and self-reflection become stunted or dead. My viewpoint might be trying to prove, but I see it as less trying to prove than Sacks’s neurological etiology, which he defends in the most convenient way of all – by not even considering any opposing points of view.
But in a world hell-bent on minimizing the blame on mothers for their children’s problems, it makes sense why Sacks can get away with turning such a blind eye.
Rating: 3 / 5
Sacks’ style is generally enjoyable and the book is very well done. The book is simply very excellent. Sacks’ style can get a bit tedious at times, but is ordinarily very excellent
Rating: 5 / 5
Yes, indeedy. If you like Oliver Sacks’ other books, you will like this one.
Rating: 4 / 5
If you are looking for a book to open your mind to the wild effects of brain hurt, you will be disappointed.
The main purpose seems to be to tell us about the daily life of people suffering from some specific conditions, how the are, how they feel, how they deal with it. Not that this might be gone of interest but, again, depends on expectations.
More questionable is that seemingly the author takes psychoanalysis sincerely. Makes the same impression of a book on medical science by an author lending credibility to homeopathy.
Rating: 3 / 5
this books proves that when certain parts in a person mind may back gone other my be more than other pepoles.this was a fantastic book the essays are very tender and really make you feel for there subjects.i espically loved the two autism articles.
Rating: 4 / 5