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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 includ
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.
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