Sign in with Facebook
Ron Peters's Reviews > The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
by
by
Ron Peters's review
bookshelves: science, humanist, consciousness
Jan 06, 2012
bookshelves: science, humanist, consciousness
Read 2 times. Last read September 10, 2021 to September 29, 2021.
This is a good book – moving, beautifully written, deeply human. I picked it up years ago and didn’t finish it; I have no idea why. I watched the documentary Oliver Sacks: His Own Life on Netflix, which made me want to pick the book up again, so I’m glad I did. The trailer is on YouTube: https://is.gd/TPD1Tx, and the movie itself can be rented on Amazon Prime and elsewhere, I’m sure.
Sacks’ books revitalized the genre of medical literature that has become popular today: Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air, Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor’s Malady: A Biography of Cancer, or Ann Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures. But I think Sacks’ writing is the best of the bunch.
His own life was as odd and interesting as any of his cases: a gay biker and avid weightlifter who had trouble picking a direction in life, engaged in “staggering bouts of pharmacological experimentation,” and suffered from lifelong face blindness. I want to read at least one of his several autobiographies now.
This is a book anyone might enjoy, since it expresses and illustrates what it means to be human.
Sacks’ books revitalized the genre of medical literature that has become popular today: Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air, Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor’s Malady: A Biography of Cancer, or Ann Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures. But I think Sacks’ writing is the best of the bunch.
His own life was as odd and interesting as any of his cases: a gay biker and avid weightlifter who had trouble picking a direction in life, engaged in “staggering bouts of pharmacological experimentation,” and suffered from lifelong face blindness. I want to read at least one of his several autobiographies now.
This is a book anyone might enjoy, since it expresses and illustrates what it means to be human.
Sign into Goodreads to see if any of your friends have read
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales.
Sign In »
