An Anthropologist on Mars

Seven Paradoxical Tales

THE INSPIRATION FOR THE NBC SERIES BRILLIANT MINDS From the bestselling author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat • Fascinating portraits of neurological disorder in which 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.

Here are seven detailed narratives of neurological patients, including a surgeon consumed by the compulsive tics of Tourette's syndrome unless he is operating; an artist who loses all sense of color in a car accident, but finds a new sensibility and creative power in black and white; and an autistic professor who cannot decipher the simplest social exchange between humans, but has built a career out of her intuitive understanding of animal behavior.

Sacks combines the well honed mind of an academician with the verve of a true storyteller.




Acknowledgments
Preface

The Case of the Colorblind Painter
The Last Hippie
A Surgeon's Life
To See and Not See
The Landscape of His Dreams
Prodigies
An Anthropologist on Mars

Selected Bibliography
References
Index
© Adam Scourfield
OLIVER SACKS, referred by the New York Times as “the poet laureate of medicine,” spent more than fifty years working as a neurologist and writing books about the neurological predicaments and conditions of his patients, including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a HatMusicophilia, and Awakenings. His work was frequently published in The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, and over the years, he received many awards, including honors from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Royal College of Physicians. View titles by Oliver Sacks

About

THE INSPIRATION FOR THE NBC SERIES BRILLIANT MINDS From the bestselling author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat • Fascinating portraits of neurological disorder in which 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.

Here are seven detailed narratives of neurological patients, including a surgeon consumed by the compulsive tics of Tourette's syndrome unless he is operating; an artist who loses all sense of color in a car accident, but finds a new sensibility and creative power in black and white; and an autistic professor who cannot decipher the simplest social exchange between humans, but has built a career out of her intuitive understanding of animal behavior.

Sacks combines the well honed mind of an academician with the verve of a true storyteller.




Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Preface

The Case of the Colorblind Painter
The Last Hippie
A Surgeon's Life
To See and Not See
The Landscape of His Dreams
Prodigies
An Anthropologist on Mars

Selected Bibliography
References
Index

Author

© Adam Scourfield
OLIVER SACKS, referred by the New York Times as “the poet laureate of medicine,” spent more than fifty years working as a neurologist and writing books about the neurological predicaments and conditions of his patients, including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a HatMusicophilia, and Awakenings. His work was frequently published in The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, and over the years, he received many awards, including honors from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Royal College of Physicians. View titles by Oliver Sacks