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› Find signed collectible books: 'An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales'
Detailed and fascinating portraits of seven neurological patients, including a surgeon consumed by the compulsive tics of Tourette's syndrome unless he is operating; an artist who loses all sense of color in a car accident, but finds a new sensibility and creative power in black and white; and an autistic professor who cannot decipher the simplest social exchange between humans, but has built a career out of her intuitive understanding of animal behavior.
"Among doctors who write with acuity and grace, Sacks ( The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat) takes a higher place with each successive book.... enlarges our view of the nature of human experience." --Publisher's Weekly
"... Dr. Sacks's best book to date." --The New York Time Book Review [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Awakenings'
It hardly seems fair that so many great doctors are also great writers. Perhaps it's qualities like sensitivity, craft, and dedication that keep physicians like Oliver Sacks in hospitals all day and at writing desks all night; if nothing else, these qualities shine in books like Awakenings. This powerful set of case histories rises above its pathological foundation to find new literary territory, a medical-spiritual synthesis equally stimulating for the mind and the soul. It's no wonder Hollywood producers chose to turn it into a feature film--anyone can see the universal human struggle against bondage and despair in these pages.
The sleeping-sickness epidemic of 1918 caused hundreds of survivors to slip into a bizarre rigid paralysis with similarities to advanced Parkinson's disease. These patients, only occasionally able to communicate or move, were nearly all institutionalized for life, their ranks increasing every now and then with similarly afflicted men and women. Sacks came to work at a long-term care facility shortly before the first exciting results with L-dopa and Parkinson's in the late 1960s; his patients soon embarked on dramatic, difficult recoveries from up to 50 years of torpor. He documents their spiritual and medical obstacles with great care to portray their individual personalities, long suppressed but finally released. Though many great doctors are also great writers, few can compare with Oliver Sacks for expressing the relation of medicine to the human spirit. --Rob Lightner [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Don't Think About Monkeys: Extraordinary Stories by People With Tourette Syndrome'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Echolalia'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Exiting Nirvana: A Daughter's Life With Autism'
Exiting Nirvana" is a strong and affecting profile of an artist with autism, beautifully written by her mother. . . . Skillfully weaving in theories of autism with the experience of raising an autistic child, Park goes beyond individual history to address the wider question of what it means to be human".--from the National Magazine Awards presentation. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Floating Cities: Venice, Amsterdam, Leningrad-And Moscow'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Granta 21: The Storyteller'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Into the Silent Land: Travels in Neuropsychology'
How does the brain construct a "self," the essence of who we are as individuals? And how does the self respond to the deconstruction of its brain? A neuropsychologist with twenty-five years' experience and a runner-up for the prestigious Wellcome Trust Science Prize, Paul Broks writes with a doctor's precision and clarity in a series of narratives about the fascinating world of the neurologically impaired, delving not only into the inner lives of his patients but into a deeper understanding of how we define who we are. In "The Sea and the Almond," a young woman who suffers from daily grand-mal seizures agrees to a radical surgery that involves removal of the amygdala (from the Greek for almond) and part of the hippocampus (seahorse), which is responsible for memory and all conscious recall. "I Think Therefore I Am Dead" is a meditation on human consciousness and an intimate case study chronicling Broks's efforts in working with a patient suffering from a debilitating illness that has no diagnosis or cure. Broks intersperses his accounts of these rare conditions with illuminating studies of what neuroscience can and cannot teach us about the mechanisms that allow us to define ourselves as individuals. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Island of the Colorblind'
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Island of the Colorblind and Cycad Island: And, Cycad Island'
In his books An Anthropologist on Mars and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks details the lives of patients isolated by neurological disorders, shedding light on our common humanity and the ways in which we perceive the world around us. Now he looks at the effects of physical isolation in The Island of the Colorblind. On this journey, he carried with him the intellectual curiousity, kind understanding, and unique vision he has so consistently demonstrated.
Drawn to the Micronesian island of Pingelap by reports of a community of people born totally colorblind, Dr. Sacks set up a clinic in a one-room dispensary. There he listened to patients describe their colorless world in terms rich with pattern and tone, luminance and shadow. Then, in Guam, he investigated a puzzling neurodegenerative paralysis, making housecalls amid crowing cockerels, cycad jungles, and the remains of a colonial culture. The experience affords Sacks an opportunity to elaborate on such personal passions as botany and history and to explore the meaning of islands, the dissemination of species, the birth of disease, and the nature of deep geologic time. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Leg to Stand On'
In this, the most personal of all his books, neurologist Oliver Sacks tells the story of an injury he sustained while climbing a mountain in Norway and the terrifying, bizarre aftermath when he realised with horror that his leg felt alienated. It did not feel like it was part of his body, but a foreign object somehow attached to him. This sort of disembodiment, with alterations in the mind-body image that affected Sacks deeply, was as confusing as it was frightening. When he finally recovered, he experienced unbounded joy and a new wonder for being properly "oriented" to his body. With insight, learning, and an unusually unbuttoned metaphysical self-revelation in which he discusses his religious background and doubts, Sacks shows how the soul is stirred by the changes in the body. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: And Other Clinical Tales'
A major bestseller and already acclaimed as a science classic, this collection of 20 true tales of individuals stricken with astonishing neurological disorders has sold over 70,000 copies. (Pscyhology) [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Man With a Shattered World: The History of a Brain Wound'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Migraine'
› Find signed collectible books: 'Migraine: The Evolution of a Common Disorder'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Migraine:the Evolution of a Common Disorder: The Evolution of a Common Disorder'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Migraine: Understanding a Common Disorder'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book About a Vast Memory'
"The Mind of a Mnemonist is a rare phenomenon - a scientific study that transcends its data and, in the manner of the best fictional literature, fashions a portrait of an unforgettable human being. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Monkeyluv: And Other Essays on Our Lives As Animals'
The human animal in all its fascinating quirks of nature is showcased in this thoughtful and entertaining essay collection from America's most beloved neurobiologist/primatologist.
In these essays -- updated for this volume -- Robert M. Sapolsky once again applies his curiosity, compassion, and generous insight into the human condition to make a case for the science of behavioral biology that tells us who we are, why we are, and how we are.
The first section, "Genes and Who We Are," addresses the physiology of genes, featuring a dissertation on "The 50 Most Beautiful People in the World" and tackling the vital question: How did they wind up on the list? Another essay explains the invisible genetic warfare that takes place between men and women as they conceive a baby and that continues as the fetus develops. As Sapolsky says, "Warning: this essay does not make pleasant wedding-night reading."
The second section, "Our Bodies and Who We Are," focuses on our physical natures and dwells on such diverse topics as why dreams are in fact dreamlike, why we are sexually attracted to one another, and why Alzheimer's disease tends to be a postmenopausal phenomenon. As Sapolsky writes, "Sometimes, all you need to do is think a thought and you change the functioning of virtually every cell in your body."
In the third section, "Society and Who We Are," Sapolsky takes his interdisciplinary curiosity out into the wilds of civilization and poses such interesting questions as: When and why do our preferences in food become fixed? Why do desert cultures tend to be monotheistic and sexually repressed, whereas rainforest cultures tend to be sexually relaxed and polytheistic? Why do different cultures think differently about dead bodies? "We are shaped by the sort of society in which we live," Sapolsky tells us, "and we would not be the same person if we had grown up elsewhere."
In each of these investigations, we see a brilliant mind synthesizing his and others' research in a thoughtful, engaging, and witty voice that reveals the enormous complexity of simply being human. Charming and erudite in equal measure, this collection will appeal to the inner monkey in all of us. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Oaxaca Journal'
› Find signed collectible books: 'Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf'
Like The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, this is a fascinating voyage into a strange and wonderful land, a provocative meditation on communication, biology, adaptation, and culture. In Seeing Voices, Oliver Sacks turns his attention to the subject of deafness, and the result is a deeply felt portrait of a minority struggling for recognition and respect--a minority with its own rich, sometimes astonishing, culture and unique visual language, an extraordinary mode of communication that tells us much about the basis of language in hearing people as well. Seeing Voices is, as Studs Terkel has written, "an exquisite, as well as revelatory, work." [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Story Teller'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Thinking in Pictures: And Other Reports from My LIfe with Autism'
Temple Grandin, Ph.D., is a gifted animal scientist who has designed one third of all the livestock-handling facilities in the United States. She also lectures widely on autismbecause Temple Grandin is autistic, a woman who thinks, feels, and experiences the world in ways that are incomprehensible to the rest of us.
In this unprecedented book, Grandin delivers a report from the country of autism. Writing from the dual perspectives of a scientist and an autistic person, she tells us how that country is experienced by its inhabitants and how she managed to breach its boundaries to function in the outside world. What emerges in Thinking in Pictures is the document of an extraordinary human being, one who, in gracefully and lucidly bridging the gulf between her condition and our own, sheds light on the riddle of our common identity. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Uncle Tungsten: Memories Of A Chemical Boyhood'
From his earliest days, Oliver Sacks, the distinguished neurologist who is also one of the most remarkable storytellers of our time, was irresistibly drawn to understanding the natural world. Born into a large family of doctors, metallurgists, chemists, physicists, and teachers, his curiosity was encouraged and abetted by aunts, uncles, parents, and older brothers. But soon after his sixth birthday, the Second World War broke out and he was evacuated from London, as were hundreds of thousands of children, to escape the bombing. Exiled to a school that rivaled Dickens's grimmest, fed on a steady diet of turnips and beetroots, tormented by a sadistic headmaster, and allowed home only once in four years, he felt desolate and abandoned.
When he returned to London in 1943 at the age of ten, he was a changed, withdrawn boy, one who desperately needed order to make sense of his life. He was sustained by his secret passions: for numbers, for metals, and for finding patterns in the world around him. Under the tutelage of his "chemical" uncle, Uncle Tungsten, Sacks began to experiment with "the stinks and bangs" that almost define a first entry into chemistry: tossing sodium off a bridge to see it take fire in the water below; producing billowing clouds of noxious-smelling chemicals in his home lab. As his interests spread to investigations of batteries and bulbs, vacuum tubes and photography, he discovered his first great scientific heroes, men and women whose genius lay in understanding the hidden order of things and disclosing the forces that sustain and support the tangible world. There was Humphry Davy, the boyish chemist who delighted in sending flaming globules of metal shooting across his lab; Marie Curie, whose heroic efforts in isolating radium would ultimately lead to the unlocking of the secrets of the atom; and Dmitri Mendeleev, inventor of the periodic table, whose pursuit of the classification of elements unfolds like a detective story.
Uncle Tungsten vividly evokes a time when virtual reality had not yet displaced a hands-on knowledge of the world. It draws us into a journey of discovery that reveals, through the enchantment and wonder of a childhood passion, the birth of an extraordinary and original mind. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Vintage Sacks'
Vintage Readers are a perfect introduction to some of the great modern writers presented in attractive, accessible paperback editions.
It is Dr. Sackss gift that he has found a way to enlarge our experience and understanding of what the human is. The Wall Street Journal
Dubbed the poet laureate of medicine by The New York Times, Oliver Sacks is a practicing neurologist and a mesmerizing storyteller. His empathetic accounts of his patientss livesand wrily observed narratives of his ownconvey both the extreme borderlands of human experience and the miracles of ordinary seeing, speaking, hearing, thinking, and feeling.
Vintage Sacks includes the introduction and case study Rose R. from Awakenings (the book that inspired the Oscar-nominated movie), as well as A Deaf World from Seeing Voices; The Visions of Hildegard from Migraine; excerpts from Island Hopping and Pingelap from The Island of the Colorblind; A Surgeons Life from An Anthropologist on Mars; and two chapters from Sackss acclaimed memoir Uncle Tungsten. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Despertares/ Awake'
Este libro relata la extraordinaria historia de un grupo de veinte pacientes ingresados en el hospital Monte carmelo de Nuevas York, supervivientes de la gran epidemia de encefalitis letargica que alcanzo dimensiones planetarias en los anos veinte del siglo pasado, y del asombroso y subito despertar que experimentaron, cuarenta anos despues, gracias al Dr. Oliver Sacks, que les administro L-Dopa, un medicamento de reciente aparicion por aquel momento. Las anecdotas que cuenta de esa serie d epacientes, cada uno de ellos con una notable personalidad, son siempre conmovedoras y dan testimonio del valor con el que se enfrentaron a la enfermedad y a veces tienen connotaciones tragicas. [via]
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