Author of the week: Oliver Sacks

last updated 8 January 2015

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.”