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Book Summary and Reviews of The Mind's Eye by Oliver Sacks

The Mind's Eye by Oliver Sacks

The Mind's Eye

by Oliver Sacks

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  • Oct 2010, 288 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

From the author of the best-selling Musicophilia (hailed as “luminous, original, and indispensable” by The American Scholar), an exploration of vision through the case histories of six individuals - including a renowned pianist who continues to give concerts despite losing the ability to read the score, and a neurobiologist born with crossed eyes who, late in life, suddenly acquires binocular vision, and how her brain adapts to that new skill. Most dramatically, Sacks gives us a riveting account of the appearance of a tumor in his own eye, the strange visual symptoms he observed, an experience that left him unable to perceive depth.

In The Mind's Eye, Oliver Sacks explores some of the most fundamental facets of human experience—how we see in three dimensions, how we represent the world internally when our eyes are closed, and the remarkable, unpredictable ways that our brains find new ways of perceiving that create worlds as complete and rich as the no-longer-visible world.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"As usual with Sacks, an absorbing attempt to unravel the complexities of the human mind." - Kirkus

"A no-brainer for the smart crowd; Sacks is so cool." –Library Journal

"Sacks has a seemingly inexhaustible talent for eloquently and humanely explaining our brains' most arcane and bizarre neurological dysfunctions." –Time Magazine

"Starred Review. Written with his trademark insight, compassion, and humor, these seven new tales once again make the obscure and arcane absolutely absorbing." - Publishers Weekly

"Riveting. – Booklist

This information about The Mind's Eye was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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Author Information

Oliver Sacks Author Biography

Oliver Sacks, M.D. was a physician, a best-selling author, and a professor of neurology at the NYU School of Medicine.

He is best known for his collections of neurological case histories, including The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat(1985), Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (2007) and The Mind's Eye (2010). Awakenings (1973), his book about a group of patients who had survived the great encephalitis lethargica epidemic of the early twentieth century, inspired the 1990 Academy Award-nominated feature film starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams. The New York Times has referred to him as "the poet laureate of medicine."

Dr. Sacks was a frequent contributor to the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, and...

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Link to Oliver Sacks's Website

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