An Anthropologist on Mars, by Oliver Sacks

[Nick]

Hi ralphm,

Thanks for the review. I went to Amazon to read a bit more and saw a high reader review rating. It looks like a fascinating read. I thought I'd post some of the Editorial Reviews below, in case anyone was interested.

"Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
The works of neurologist Oliver Sacks have a special 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 under the heading of "the human mind."

The stories in An Anthropologist on Mars are medical case reports not unlike the classic tales of Berton Roueché in
The Medical Detectives. Sacks's stories are of "differently brained" people, and they have the intrinsic human interest that spurred his book Awakenings to be re-created as a Robin Williams movie.

The title story in Anthropologist is that of autistic Temple Grandin, whose own book Thinking 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 surgeon with Tourette's syndrome, a painter who loses color vision, 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 damage for whom it is always 1968.

Oliver Sacks is the Carl Sagan or Stephen Jay Gould of his field; his books are true classics of medical writing, of the breadth of human mentality, and of the inner lives of the disabled. --Mary Ellen Curtin

From Publishers Weekly
Neurologist Sacks presents seven case studies of people whose "abnormalities" of brain function offer new insights into conceptions of human personality and consciousness.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Book 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."

[ralphm]

Even though this is not an esoteric book I think it is important to read for anyone interested in altered states since Dr. Sacks investigates the  outer limits of human experience-the artist that loses all color vision, the deadhead who only lives in the moment, the surgeon with tourettes. He is the author(a neurologist)  whose book Awakenings was made into a movie and the lives he explores are as strange as something Casteneda wrote.