Oliver Sacks has spent four decades writing about “ordinary people living with extraordinary conditions,” said Andrew Anthony in the London Guardian. “My patients come to me with stories. They have predicaments. They come in searching for ways of dealing with them. There is something dramatic in all of this,” says the neurologist and author, 77. In The Mind’s Eye, Sacks observes six individuals coping with disorders affecting vision—including a woman who regains stereo vision after living for decades without it and an author who develops “word blindness,” losing the ability to read. Sacks also ventures into memoir with accounts of his recent loss of vision in one eye and inability to recognize faces that should be familiar.
Sacks’ goal with every story is to illuminate “neurological challenges that are almost impossible for the rest of us to imagine,” said Leonard Cassuto in BNreview.com. “We can imagine what it’s like to be Cordelia or King Lear or whatever,” Sacks says, “but it’s not so easy to imagine being agnosic”—lacking the ability to interpret visual images or similar stimuli. Sacks has been criticized for building a writing career on other people’s disabilities, but his own experience tells him there’s real therapeutic value in learning about, say, a cross-eyed neurobiologist who suddenly is able to see in 3-D, or a blind psychologist who performs complex tasks through visualization. Such cases, he says, “showed me that there is no set way of handling blindness.”
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Create an account with the same email registered to your subscription to unlock access.
-
'No war is good'Today's Newspapers A roundup of the headlines from the US front pages
-
The Week Unwrapped: will the US end child marriage?Podcast Why some states have no lower limit on marriage age, plus Black maternal health and the price of olive oil
-
Perplexity AI: has Google finally met its match?In The Spotlight Generative AI start-up provides fast, Wikipedia-like responses to search queries
-
Also of interest...in picture books for grown-upsfeature How About Never—Is Never Good for You?; The Undertaking of Lily Chen; Meanwhile, in San Francisco; The Portlandia Activity Book
-
Author of the week: Karen Russell
feature Karen Russell could use a rest.
-
The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
feature Evelyn Barish “has an amazing tale to tell” about the Belgian-born intellectual who enthralled a generation of students and academic colleagues.
-
Book of the week: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
feature Michael Lewis's description of how high-frequency traders use lightning-fast computers to their advantage is “guaranteed to make blood boil.”
-
Also of interest...in creative rebellion
feature A Man Called Destruction; Rebel Music; American Fun; The Scarlet Sisters
-
Author of the week: Susanna Kaysen
feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
-
You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age by Robert Wagner
feature Robert Wagner “seems to have known anybody who was anybody in Hollywood.”
-
Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”