The Mind's Eye

Starred review from November 8, 2010
Sacks, a neurologist and practicing physician at Columbia University Medical Center, and author of ten popular books on the quirks of the human mind (The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat) focuses here on creative people who have learned to compensate for potentially devastating disabilities. From the concert pianist who progressively lost the ability to recognize objects (including musical scores) yet managed to keep performing from memory, to the writer whose stroke disturbed his ability to read but not his ability to write (he used his experience to write a novel about a detective suffering from amnesia), to Sacks himself, who suffers from "face blindness," a condition that renders him unable to recognize people, even relatives and, sometimes, himself (he once confused a stranger's face in a window with his own reflection), Sacks finds fascination in the strange workings of the human mind. Written with his trademark insight, compassion, and humor, these seven new tales once again make the obscure and arcane absolutely absorbing.

March 1, 2011
Neurologist Sacks (www.oliversacks.com), who in "Musicophila"(2007) explored the human sense of hearing, once again mines his practice for fascinating case studies, this time to explore another sense, that of sight. In discussing the experiences of six individuals whose vision-related maladies force creative and often astonishing coping and adaptive behaviors, he talks of patients' inability to recognize faces, their late acquisition and loss of three-dimensional vision, and more. Sacks introduces each story, which is then read matter-of-factly by actor Richard Davidson. Sacks poignantly reads the chapter titled "Persistence of Vision"—about his own gradual loss of vision in one eye as the result of ocular cancer. A strong choice for nonfiction collections. ["The author's well-known style creatively balances complex medical discussion…with solid, down-to-earth prose," read the review of the z"New York Times"best-selling Knopf hc, "LJ"10/1/10.—Ed.]—Kristen L. Smith, Loras Coll. Lib., Dubuque, IA

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