The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

A book with intermittent sparks of engaging storytelling, bogged down by tons of masturbatory exposition on his insights and philosophical references (what an intellectual!). Not a great storyteller but I slogged through because the stories of the patients themselves were fascinating. Three stars.

Fascinating stories, but the author's meandering writing style makes reading a chore.

Interesting stories.

Brains want to boogie
ladies love to feel frisky
do drugs while you're young.

This book is a treasure. I must admit, Oliver Sacks is not the best of writers, his prose can be a bit dry and dare I say clinical at times. But he more than makes up for it with great insight and a host of unparalleled stories about the weird and wonderful world of super-specific neurological conditions. Sack's book is a collection of fairly casually reported highly interesting, clinical cases from his career as a neurologist. At times funny and at times tragic, sacks manages to bring the human element into each of these cases, while also shedding light on how the mind works in the process.

This was a really interesting read for me. I don't really read too many non-fiction novels on my free time, but I intend to change that–especially after reading this book. Oliver Sacks re-sparked my fascination of the Neurobiology field by bringing in a very personal, human narrative to the stories, which many people can relate to. Although it is easy to get lost in the scientific/medical jargon, I hope readers can get past that because I think he does a wonderful job leading his readers through his thought processes.

Bottom line: This is a very thought provoking book, and I can definitely see myself picking it up in the future to reread a couple of the tales.

Fascinating stories. Especially, the woman who lost her Proprioception. She lost all sense of her joints location. Close your eyes and touch and you can still touch your finger to your nose. This woman, when she closes her eyes she looses all sense of where her fingers are. She could only move when she could see her limbs. Many other interesting stories but this one stood out.

some word choices were made

This brain of ours is really strange sometimes, but hey, we at least get to have musicogenic epilepsy (the most intriguing case from this book).

Dry writing. Don't get me wrong - Dr. Sacks was a hugely popular, influential and brilliant neurologist and his case histories became best-seller books (like this one) - but for me, his writing left a lot to be desired.

Wow someone from a small film school should really work on adapting this in to a short film

This book is so dated as to be useless to the casual reader. While the cases it presents may still be interesting for those in the profession to analyze, people reading from a less professional perspective will find nothing of any worth. This book is so full of horrifying 1970's style racism (comparing “savages” to children and “retards” and “simpletons”, calling cases retardeds, simpletons, idiots, and worse, etc) that while some of the information may still be valid today, I cannot take a single word of it seriously. If the author took the time to read and write a forward for the audio edition, why on earth didn't he take the time to go through the text, and at least update some of the worst blunders? Yes, I realize time and language have changed. But that's no reason to perpetuate historical mistakes in what is sold as a popular psych book, especially not when the author is alive and well and could update the text.