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[My new book] starts in 1960 with a woman named Lois Rabinowitz, who was evicted from Manhattan traffic court for attempting to pay a parking ticket while wearing slacks. This was... Continue »
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Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: and other Clinical Tales

by Oliver W. Sacks

Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: and other Clinical Tales Cover

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

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."

Review:

"Insightful, compassionate, moving...the lucidity and power of a gifted writer." John C. Marshall, The New York Times Book Review

Review:

"Dr. Sacks's most absorbing book....His tales are so compelling that many of them serve as eerie metaphors not only for the condition of modern medicine but of modern man." New York Magazine

About the Author

Oliver Sacks was born in London and educated in London, Oxford, California, and New York. He is professor of clinical neurology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He is the author of many books, including Awakenings and A Leg to Stand On.

Product Details

ISBN:
9780671554712
Subtitle:
and Other Clinical Tales
Publisher:
Summit Books
Author:
Sacks, Oliver W.
Location:
New York :
Subject:
Neurology
Subject:
Neurology -- Anecdotes.
Edition Description:
Bibliography: p. 224-233.
Series Volume:
no. 26
Publication Date:
c1985
Illustrations:
Y
Pages:
xvi, 233 p.

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