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oyceterThis may have been one of the scariest books I read this year. It's not meant to be, but it deals with a subject that I find incredibly, deeply disturbing and frightening -- the oddities and malfunctions of the human mind.
Sacks has collected a bunch of essays he wrote from the mid-1970s through the 1980s. Some of them are about patients with "deficits" or missing senses, like one woman who lost her sense of where parts of her body were and felt like she never quite belonged in her body, or the man who could intellectually recognize shapes, but couldn't put them together and grasp the emotional (thereby mistaking his wife's head for a hat).
The second part is about patients with "extra" senses, like the phantom limb syndrome, or the added tics of Tourette's. The third part, which I found the most problematic, is about "simple" people. As a forewarning, Sacks does call them "retarded" and "mentally deficient;" I suspect a lot of this was considered proper usage at the time he wrote the essays.
While I enjoyed reading about his patients and marveling at how complex and strange our minds were, the stories completely freak me out as well. Particularly the ones about memory loss or loss of certain senses. This is probably a very idiosyncratic reaction: Alzheimer's is basically my worst nightmare.
My problems with the third section go with how Sacks both idealizes and pathologizes his "simple" patients. He focuses on seeing them as a whole, not as a disease, which I agree with, but sometimes he goes on about how they have this inner beauty that just struck the wrong note with me. I'm not quite sure how to articulate it, but it threw me off. Actually, I got the same impression with several of his other essays, this strange push-pull of idealizing an illness while also pathologizing the person who has it, when I think he intended to pathologize the illness and humanize the person who has it.
Interesting, but probably a book I'll end up giving away.
Sacks has collected a bunch of essays he wrote from the mid-1970s through the 1980s. Some of them are about patients with "deficits" or missing senses, like one woman who lost her sense of where parts of her body were and felt like she never quite belonged in her body, or the man who could intellectually recognize shapes, but couldn't put them together and grasp the emotional (thereby mistaking his wife's head for a hat).
The second part is about patients with "extra" senses, like the phantom limb syndrome, or the added tics of Tourette's. The third part, which I found the most problematic, is about "simple" people. As a forewarning, Sacks does call them "retarded" and "mentally deficient;" I suspect a lot of this was considered proper usage at the time he wrote the essays.
While I enjoyed reading about his patients and marveling at how complex and strange our minds were, the stories completely freak me out as well. Particularly the ones about memory loss or loss of certain senses. This is probably a very idiosyncratic reaction: Alzheimer's is basically my worst nightmare.
My problems with the third section go with how Sacks both idealizes and pathologizes his "simple" patients. He focuses on seeing them as a whole, not as a disease, which I agree with, but sometimes he goes on about how they have this inner beauty that just struck the wrong note with me. I'm not quite sure how to articulate it, but it threw me off. Actually, I got the same impression with several of his other essays, this strange push-pull of idealizing an illness while also pathologizing the person who has it, when I think he intended to pathologize the illness and humanize the person who has it.
Interesting, but probably a book I'll end up giving away.
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