Product Description

"The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" is populated by a cast as strange as that of the most fantastic fiction. The subject of this strange and wonderful book is what happens when things go wrong with parts of the brain most of us don't know exist ...Dr Sacks shows the awesome powers of our mind and just how delicately balanced they have to be' - "Sunday Times". 'Who is this book for? Who is it not for? It is for everybody who has felt from time to time that certain twinge of self-identity and sensed how easily, at any moment, one might lose it' - "The Times". 'This is, in the best sense, a serious book. It is, indeed, a wonderful book, by which I mean not only that it is excellent (which it is) but also that it is full of wonder, wonders and wondering. He brings to these often unhappy people understanding, sympathy and respect. Sacks is always learning from his patients, marvelling at them, widening his own understanding and ours' - "Punch".

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #786 in Books
• Published on: 1986-11-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

About the Author
Oliver Sacks was educated in London, Oxford, California and New York. He is a professor of clinical neurology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He is the author of many books, including Musicophilia and Awakenings.

Customer Reviews

A disappointment
I suppose that it falls to me to provide a negative review of this book. I've not given the book a low rating because while it didn't meet my expectations, it's certainly well written and interesting.

Having read Dennett's "Consciousness Explained" in which ( I think) this book is referenced, I chose this book hoping that Sacks would provide some insight into how or why a man might mistake his wife for a hat. Unfortunately the book turned out to be a rather less ambitious series of case histories of his patients. True, they're interesting and tragic histories and certainly Sacks does empathise with his patients, treating them as more than just medical subjects. However the book was, for me, profoundly unsatisfying as it didn't go into the mechanics of their problems or shed any insight (at least for a neurological layman like myself) on the inner workings of even undamaged brains. Return to Dennett for that, perhaps?

I was also a little perturbed by the occasional foray into less than scientific discussions about whether the more deeply damaged patients could be thought of as having "souls". I think that I would be deeply concerned if, had I been brain damaged, my neurologist spent any time worrying about the state of my soul!

I didn't find the book hard to get into although I agree that there's plenty of jargon that could/should have been explained (a glossary at least?) and I certainly didn't find it over-academic - quite the reverse in places. However, I neither did I manage to get more than half-way through before dropping it so maybe aI missed something in the later chapters.

Interesting read
Fairly well written, and as someone who has no prior background in this field, it was easy to understand and descriptive enough to be interesting. it was not too technical that i got bogged down with terms, unlike some other neurology books i've read.

A little disappointing
An interesting book though I have to admit I didn't enjoy the writing style. I find Sacks to be overly academic (I'm in the medical field myself) and his use of technical jargon can be somewhat off putting. Unlike the popular work Phantoms of the Brains Sacks seems uninterested in explaining the ideas in scientific terms in any great detail, he instead takes a more anthropological approach and merely details the cases. Whilst the cases themselves are off considerable interest I found his analysis to be lacking. His writing style didn't sit well with me, though this may be more my fault than his, and ultimately I didn't find myself much wiser after having read the book.

The book is still worth reading, however for a non-medical reader I'd recommend the far superior Phantoms of the Brain before approaching this work as it'll help you understand a lot of what Sacks talks about. There were, within the book, one or two cases that viewers of House M.D. would recognise.