An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales (Signed First)

Sacks, Oliver

ISBN 10: 0330337173 / ISBN 13: 9780330337175

Published by Picador, 1995

About this Item

First edition, first impression, signed and dated at publication to the title page by Oliver Sacks - signed examples of the UK edition are scarce. Fine: tight and square binding in sharp red boards; very tight, crisp and clean, presenting as unread. The unclipped dustwrapper is Near Fine: crisp and vibrant; Fine but for a little fading to the cream background colour at the spine; presented in a removable, archival-quality protective cover. A handsome copy with the distinction of the author's signature. All orders are sent very carefully wrapped in bubble wrap and sturdy cardboard.

Seller Inventory # M624

Bibliographic Details

• Title: An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales (Signed First)
• Publisher: Picador
• Publication Date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0330337173
• ISBN 13: 9780330337175
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)
• Seller catalogs:
  • Selected Signed

About this title

Synopsis

The works of neurologist Oliver Sacks have a special place in the swarm of mind-brain studies. He has done as much as anyone to make nonspecialists aware of how much diversity gets lumped under the heading of "the human mind."

The stories in An Anthropologist on Mars are medical case reports not unlike the classic tales of Berton Roueché in The Medical Detectives. Sacks's stories are of "differently brained" people, and they have the intrinsic human interest that spurred his book Awakenings to be re-created as a Robin Williams movie.

The title story in Anthropologist is that of autistic Temple Grandin, whose own book Thinking in Pictures gives her version of how she feels--as unlike other humans as a cow or a Martian. The other minds Sacks describes are equally remarkable: a surgeon with Tourette's syndrome, a painter who loses color vision, a blind man given the ambiguous gift of sight, artists with memories that overwhelm "real life," the autistic artist Stephen Wiltshire, and a man with memory damage for whom it is always 1968.

Oliver Sacks is the Carl Sagan or Stephen Jay Gould of his field; his books are true classics of medical writing, of the breadth of human mentality, and of the inner lives of the disabled. --Mary Ellen Curtin