The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

by OliverSacks (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  2011

  $11.90

  'Oliver Sacks has become the world's best-known neurologist. His case studies of broken minds offer brilliant insight into the mysteries of consciousness' Guardian In his most extraordinary book, Oliver Sacks recounts the stories of patients lost in the bizarre, apparently inescapable world of neurological disorders. These are case studies of people who have lost their memories and with them the greater part of their pasts; who are no longer able to recognize people or common objects; whose limbs have become alien; who are afflicted and yet are gifted with uncanny artistic or mathematical talents. In Dr Sacks's splendid and sympathetic telling, each tale is a unique and deeply human study of life struggling against incredible adversity. 'Populated by a cast as strange as that of the most fantastic fiction ...Dr Sacks shows the awesome powers of our mind and just how delicately balanced they have to be' Sunday Times 'This book is for everybody who has felt from time to time that certain twinge of self-identity and sensed how easily, at any moment, one might lose it' The Times 'A gripping journey into the recesses of the human mind' Daily Mail

• Used

  Paperback
  1998

  $3.25

  In his most extraordinary book, one of the great clinical writers of the 20th century (The New York Times) recounts the case histories of patients lost in the bizarre, apparently inescapable world of neurological disorders. Oliver Sacks's The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat tells the stories of individuals afflicted with fantastic perceptual and intellectual aberrations: patients who have lost their memories and with them the greater part of their pasts; who are no longer able to recognize people and common objects; who are stricken with violent tics and grimaces or who shout involuntary obscenities; whose limbs have become alien; who have been dismissed as retarded yet are gifted with uncanny artistic or mathematical talents. If inconceivably strange, these brilliant tales remain, in Dr. Sacks's splendid and sympathetic telling, deeply human. They are studies of life struggling against incredible adversity, and they enable us to enter the world of the neurologically impaired, to imagine with our hearts what it must be to live and feel as they do. A great healer, Sacks never loses sight of medicine's ultimate responsibility: the suffering, afflicted, fighting human subject.