Archives: Thoughts on Science Books
- The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hatby Oliver Sacks
- Sacks, a neurologist, describes some of his more interesting and unusual patients in a series of essays. One of his patients has short-term memory loss so severe that, five minutes later, he can't remember meeting Dr. Sacks. A pair of autistic twins seems to live in a world of numbers. All the stories are bizarre and fascinating, and while it seems that they would be sad, they're not--Sacks either finds the beauty in them or tells how they learned to cope with the world. Some of the stories are almost unbelievable. It's difficult to imagine how the brain could lose certain abilities while maintaining others. I found this a very intriguing book.