An Anthropologist on Mars

Sacks, Oliver. An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales. New York: Vintage. 1995. Print.

First Sentences:

Early in March 1986 I received the following letter:

I am a rather successful artist just past 65 years of age. On January 2nd of this year I was driving my car and was hit by a small truck on the passenger side of my vehicle. When visiting the emergency room of a local hospital, I was told I had a concussion. 

While taking an eye examination, it was discovered that I was unable to distinguish letters of colors. The letters appeared to be Greek letters. My vision was such that everything appeared to me as viewing a black and white television screen. 

Description:

Oliver Sacks is a practicing neurologist and professor at medical schools in New York including Columbia and New York University, as well as a consulting clinician at a chronic care facility. His experiences with people who have fascinating brain disorders make up his highly engaging book, An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales.

In this collection, Sacks encounters and writes about such functioning, yet uniquely challenged individuals he works with including:

• An artist who, after a minor car accident, wakes to find he can only see the world in black and white. His can no longer distinguish even gradations of black, white, and gray, making his ability to paint frustratingly challenging;

• A surgeon with Tourette's Syndrome (and its accompanying uncontrollable tics, starts, verbal exclamations, and lurches), who still performs delicate surgeries;

• An autistic boy who can quickly and accurately draw complex architectural buildings in detail, even after only glimpsing them for a few seconds;

• A man, blind from birth, who regains his sight and the benefits, but also struggles with the challenges of living in a world of images where before there was only sound and his imagination;

• A 54-year-old artist who only creates paintings of the buildings in his small hometown in Italy, a location he left forever at age 15;

• An autistic woman who created her own business, invented unique machines and holding areas for cattle and other livestock, yet cannot relate to people and the language of social behavior. She must memorize how people act in various situations to remember and hopefully predict how she and others might respond to her. So strange is her distancing from other people and her own memorization of their actions that she says she feels like "an anthropologist on Mars."

Sacks interacts with these people as an interested friend rather than a prescribing doctor in a clinical setting. He converses with them as he tries to simply understand the characteristics of their particular situation, and more importantly how these people attempt to cope with their limitations.

Sacks is a great storyteller and writer, bringing both the naivete of someone looking on a peculiar situation for the first time, as well the in-depth analysis of a trained doctor and researcher using references to studies by experts in these fields to gain insights and possible explanations, but rarely solutions. 

Here are fascinating people, ably presented and befriended by Sacks, who relate their stories with a compassion and thoroughness which allow readers to fully experience the world of people successfully living with neurological disorders that might cripple others.

A heartfelt, scientific, and personal series of human stories that I guarantee will make you look at the lives of others with new admiration and insight into the challenges faces. And when you are done, I guarantee you will be thankful for your own fairly whole and normal life. 

Happy reading. 

Fred

www.firstsentencereader.blogspot.com

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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Sacks, Oliver. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: And Other Clinical Tales

The definitive collection of fascinatingly bizarre but true clinical experiences of Sacks with unusual neurological disorders, including lost memories, inability to recognize faces (including their own), ability to judge lying without hearing words, etc. Sacks treats all patients with respect as he seeks the cause and possible treatment of these cases.

Sacks, Oliver. Awakening

Intrigued by a group of people who contracted sleeping sickness just after World War ! and unable to move for decades, Sacks experiments on them with a new medicine that "wakes" them up to full consciousness, with unexpected results.