With Humanities Highlights, Himmelfarb staff aims to spotlight useful books from our Humanities collection. This week, we’re showcasing “An Anthropologist on Mars,” by Oliver Sacks.
About the Book: "An Anthropologist on Mars" explores seven fascinating cases of mental conditions, depicting outliers who not only had a rare experience but the talent or background to make sense of it. Drawing from his direct contact with these patients, Sacks enriches the facts of these accounts with history and a strong narrative sense. These limit cases help us not only understand others with these conditions but human cognition itself.
Reasons to Read: If you like listicles but want something more robust and literary; "Anthropologist" is a set of seven attention-grabbing, memorable cases; except, unlike the average listicle (which features recycled content and minimal research), the stories in "Anthropologist" come from first-hand accounts and benefit from Sacks bountiful knowledge and narrative capabilities. Recommended if you enjoy thinking about creativity and the relationship between limitations and strengths.
Reasons to Avoid: While eloquent and readable, the book is aimed at general readers (and therefore contains broad overviews of neurological conditions that might be redundant to researchers); moreover, Sacks interacts with patients in a "gonzo journalism" kind of way, embedding himself in their lives outside of a clinical setting. This gonzo psychiatry makes excellent reading but may be of less clinical use.
Further Reading:
- Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain [available at the Himmelfarb Library]
- The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat [available through the Consortium Loan Service]
- A Collection of Moments: A Study of Involuntary Memories [available through the Consortium Loan Service]
- Scattered Shadows: a Memoir of Blindness and Vision [available online through E-Book Central Complete]
