Sacks, Oliver W.

The man who mistook his wife for a hat and other clinical tales by Oliver W Sacks( Libro/Texto )
62 editions published between 1970 and 2008 in 18 languages and held by 3,810 libraries worldwide
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."

An anthropologist on Mars : seven paradoxical tales by Oliver W Sacks( Libro/Texto )
17 editions published between 1995 and 2006 in Inglés (eng) and Finlandés (fin) and held by 2,699 libraries worldwide
The author profiles seven neurological patients, including a surgeon with Tourette's syndrome and an artist whose color sense is destroyed in an accident but finds new creative power in black and white.

Seeing voices : a journey into the world of the deaf by Oliver W Sacks( Libro/Texto )
16 editions published between 1989 and 2000 in 3 languages and held by 2,409 libraries worldwide
An authoritative and fascinating insight into what it is like to live in a world without sound, this book also recounts the history of sign language, the main method of communication for deaf people.

Awakenings by Oliver W Sacks( Libro/Texto )
43 editions published between 1973 and 2005 in 12 languages and held by 2,341 libraries worldwide
Dr. Sacks examines the experiences of some victims of sleeping sickness who after forty years of virtual paralysis of movement and mind awoke to discover that they had aged while they slept.

Musicophilia : tales of music and the brain by Oliver W Sacks( Libro/Texto )
13 editions published between 2007 and 2008 in Inglés (eng) and held by 2,337 libraries worldwide
Music can move us to the heights or depths of emotion. It can persuade us to buy something, or remind us of our first date. It can lift us out of depression when nothing else can. It can get us dancing to its beat. But the power of music goes much, much further. Indeed, music occupies more areas of our brain than language does--humans are a musical species. Oliver Sacks's compassionate, compelling tales of people struggling to adapt to different neurological conditions have fundamentally changed the way we think of our own brains, and of the human experience. Here, he examines the powers of music through the individual experiences of patients, musicians, and everyday people. Music is irresistible, haunting, and unforgettable, and Oliver Sacks tells us why.--From publisher description.

Uncle Tungsten : memories of a chemical boyhood by Oliver W Sacks( Libro/Texto )
29 editions published between 2001 and 2002 in Inglés (eng) and held by 2,157 libraries worldwide
Long before Oliver Sacks became a neurologist and one of our finest science writers, he was a small English boy fascinated by metals -- and also by chemical reactions, the louder and smellier the better. His curiosity was encouraged and abetted by brilliantly quirky relatives: Auntie Len, who taught him that the beauty of numbers can be found in the spiral face of a sunflower; Uncle Dave, who invited the boy to his light-bulb factory; and two older brothers who entertained him by making ammonium dichromate "volcanoes." But Sacks's childhood was interrupted by the outbreak of the Second World War, when he was evacuated from London and sent to live in a boarding school that rivaled Dickens's grimmest creations. He was sustained through those difficult years by his passion for learning and for finding patterns in the world around him. Overflowing with humor, sadness, sensuous recollection, and the almost physical rapture of discovery, Uncle Tungsten re-creates the wonder of science as it is first experienced and chronicles the birth of an extraordinary and original mind.

The island of the colorblind ; and, Cycad island by Oliver W Sacks( Libro/Texto )
7 editions published between 1996 and 1998 in Inglés (eng) and Hebreo (heb) and held by 1,596 libraries worldwide
Oliver Sacks has always been fascinated by islands--their remoteness, their mystery, above all the unique forms of life they harbor. For him, islands conjure up equally the romance of Melville and Stevenson, the adventure of Magellan and Cook, and the scientific wonder of Darwin and Wallace. Drawn to the tiny Pacific atoll of Pingelap by intriguing reports of an isolated community of islanders born totally color-blind, Sacks finds himself setting up a clinic in a one-room island dispensary, where he listens to these achromatopic islanders describe their colorless world in rich terms of pattern and tone, luminance and shadow. And on Guam, where he goes to investigate the puzzling neurodegenerative paralysis endemic there for a century, he becomes, for a brief time, an island neurologist, making house calls with his colleague John Steele, amid crowing cockerels, cycad jungles, and the remains of a colonial culture. The islands reawaken Sacks' lifelong passion for botany--in particular, for the primitive cycad trees, whose existence dates back to the Paleozoic--and the cycads are the starting point for an intensely personal reflection on the meaning of islands, the dissemination of species, the genesis of disease, and the nature of deep geologic time. Out of an unexpected journey, Sacks has woven an unforgettable narrative which immerses us in the romance of island life, and shares his own compelling vision of the complexities of being human.

A leg to stand on by Oliver W Sacks( Libro/Texto )
50 editions published between 1984 and 2003 in 9 languages and held by 1,340 libraries worldwide

Oaxaca journal by Oliver W Sacks( Libro/Texto )
17 editions published between 2001 and 2007 in 3 languages and held by 906 libraries worldwide

Migraine by Oliver W Sacks( Libro/Texto )
23 editions published between 1970 and 2008 in 7 languages and held by 892 libraries worldwide