The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat |
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HarperCollins Publishers 1985 243pp. 0-684-85394-9 (paper) Bibliography |
[The book] is insightful, compassionate, moving and, on occasion, simply infuriating. One could call these essays neurological case histories, and correctly so, although Dr. Sacks' own expression--"clinical tales"--is far more apt. Dr. Sacks tells some two dozen stories about people who are also patients, and who manifest strange and striking peculiarities of perception, emotion, language, thought, memory or action. And he recounts these histories with the lucidity and power of a gifted short-story writer. [However, Sacks] constantly plays naive about the neurological literature...Dr. Sacks is too sophisticated to convince the reader of such ignorance.
--Reviewed by John C. Marshall in The New York Times Book Review, (March 2 1986), p. 3. (From Book Review Digest database).