Editor Reviews:

Product Description:
In his most extraordinary book, "one of the great clinical writers of the 20th century" (The New York Times) recounts the case histories of patients lost in the bizarre, apparently inescapable world of neurological disorders. Oliver Sacks's The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat tells the stories of individuals afflicted with fantastic perceptual and intellectual aberrations: patients who have lost their memories and with them the greater part of their pasts; who are no longer able to recognize people and common objects; who are stricken with violent tics and grimaces or who shout involuntary obscenities; whose limbs have become alien; who have been dismissed as retarded yet are gifted with uncanny artistic or mathematical talents.

If inconceivably strange, these brilliant tales remain, in Dr. Sacks's splendid and sympathetic telling, deeply human. They are studies of life struggling against incredible adversity, and they enable us to enter the world of the neurologically impaired, to imagine with our hearts what it must be to live and feel as they do. A great healer, Sacks never loses sight of medicine's ultimate responsibility: "the suffering, afflicted, fighting human subject."

Rating : - A must read!
This book was assigned text for a neuropsych. class I had during my undergraduate degree. It was by far the best text I've had assigned in any class. This book, along with Ramachandran's, Phantom's in the Brain, was the first time I even considered the Nature side of the Nature/Nurture debate. I will never forget the stories. Learning about these cases with brain disorders left me with such a sense of awe for what the brain can do. Sacks has a wonderful writing style that turns philosophical at the end of each story, so you are left with a lot of food for thought. It is also a great exercise to follow his choices at each step and weight it against what you may have done.