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An anthropologist on Mars : seven paradoxical tales

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This collection of essays are mainly casebook studies.

Neurological patients, Oliver Sacks once wrote, are travellers to unimaginable lands.This book 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 colour 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 behaviour.These are paradoxical tales, for neurological disease can conduct one or other modes of being which - however abnormal they may be to our way of thinking - may develop beauties and virtues of their own.

Thus one young man, Stephen Wiltshire, who is both retarded and autistic, none-the-less has produced thousands of astonishing drawings.

The exploration of these individual lives is not one that can be conducted 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.Sacks also offers a perspective on th

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Product Details
Picador
0330343475 / 9780330343473
Paperback
616.809
12/01/1996
United Kingdom
English
xviii, 318p., [16]p. of plates : ill. (some col.)
20 cm
general Learn More
Originally published: New York: Alfred A. Knopf.