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.

From Library Journal
According to Sacks (The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, LJ 2/15/86), developmental defects, diseases, and disorders play a paradoxical role in human lives. Ravenous and destructive on the one hand, they also bring about unexpected growth and evolution of the extremely adaptive nervous system as it is forced to develop new paths and new ways of doing things. Sacks offers seven portraits exemplifying the "creative" potential of disease, including an artist who loses all sense of color in a car accident but finds a new sensibility and creative power in black and white; a surgeon consumed by the compulsive tics of Tourette's Syndrome unless he is operating; and an autistic Ph.D. who cannot interpret the simplest social exchange between humans but has built a career out of her intuitive understanding of animal behavior. Taking leave of his white coat and the hospital environment, Sacks explores his subjects closely. True to his past work, he offers compelling stories told with the cognizance of a clinician and the heart and compassion of a poet. He also includes a superbly annotated bibliography for further study. This insightful and inspirational collection is essential for all libraries. [BOMC selection.]-David R. Johnson, Arnold LeDoux Lib., Louisiana State Univ., Eunic.--David R. Johnson, Arnold LeDoux Lib., Louisiana State Univ., EuniceCopyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
One of the most gratifying contemporary literary success stories is that of Sacks. He's a scribbling doctor (so to speak), but unlike most of his peers, he resorts to neither fiction nor philosophy. He reports on his own specialty, neurology--to be precise, on the personal results of and responses to neurological conditions that in this book include color blindness, severe temporal and frontal lobe brain damage, Tourette's syndrome, giving eyesight to a man blind since early childhood, seizures of intense recollection, and autism. Rather weighty stuff to make the best-seller list, as The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1986) did, or to serve as the basis for a hit movie, as Awakenings (1990) did. But Sacks writes as well as the great nineteenth-century physician-writer, Thomas Henry Huxley (he even uses real, substantive, readable footnotes, not just source notes), and like another, John Watson (well, okay, Arthur Conan Doyle), he imparts to his reports the deductive fascination and often the suspense of detective stories (he even names them with detective titles: "The Case of the Colorblind Painter," for instance). More than either Huxley or Watson-Doyle, he fills his writings with the same sympathy and admiration for his profoundly other-than-normal subjects and their struggles and accomplishments that we feel while reading about them. Knopf is giving Sacks' new book a 100,000-copy first printing; since it's a better book than The Man Who Mistook (which included some cursory reprints from medical journals as well as fully developed cases; this book's all the latter), may it sell every copy. Ray Olson

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.

From the Inside Flap
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.

FROM OUR EDITORS

Paradoxical portraits of seven 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 new creative power in black & white; others.

ANNOTATION

"...the premier neurologist/writer, Sacks uses his graceful prose to examine the strange and paradoxical nature of neurological syndromes, which call for the use of equally strange & creative methods to gain insight into their world"

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Neurological patients, Oliver Sacks once wrote, are travellers to unimaginable lands. An Anthropologist on Mars offers portraits of seven such travellers - 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. These are paradoxical tales, for neurological disease can conduct one to other modes of being that - however abnormal they may be to our way of thinking - may develop virtues and beauties of their own. The exploration of these individual lives is not one that can be made in a consulting room or office, and Sacks has taken off his white coat and deserted the hospital, by and large, to join his subjects in their own environments. He feels, he says, in part like a neuroanthropologist, but most of all like a physician, called here and there to make house calls, house calls at the far border of experience. Along the way, he shows us a new perspective on the way our brains construct our individual worlds. In his lucid and compelling reconstructions of the mental acts we take for granted - the act of seeing, the transport of memory, the notion of color - Oliver Sacks provokes anew a sense of wonder at who we are.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly