The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: and Other Clinical Tales

By: Oliver Sacks

Narrated by: Jonathan Davis, Oliver Sacks - introduction

Length: 9 hrs and 33 mins

Publisher's summary

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' 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' 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".

PLEASE NOTE: Some changes have been made to the original manuscript with the permission of Oliver Sacks.

©1970, 1981, 1983, 1984, 1985 Oliver Sacks (P)2011 Audible, Inc.

Critic reviews

"Dr. Sacks's best book.... One sees a wise, compassionate and very literate mind at work in these 20 stories, nearly all remarkable, and many the kind that restore one's faith in humanity." ( Chicago Sun-Times)

"Dr. Sacks's most absorbing book.... His tales are so compelling that many of them serve as eerie metaphors not only for the condition of modern medicine but of modern man." ( New York magazine)

One of the best!

if you like neurology, human behavior or just like to read some interesting stories this is an excellent book written by an artulate, jewel of a genius.

painful

unbearably arrogant writing. sacks has an obvious savior complex and a poor writing style. a regretful read.

World of many views

Very insightful. Could not stop listening to the audiobook until it was finished. At times hard to follow and needed to go over some chapters twice.

To my mind, the "original" Sachs book...

in the main because its eponymous essay was the first that I read of Sachs and because I have subsequently taught the essay many times (in actuality, Awakenings preceded Mistook by more than a decade). Like Selzer in Tales Of A Knife and Ramachandran in The Tell-Tale Brain, Sachs brings the reader startlingly close to his patients, revealing with poetic accuracy and detail the frightening, distressing, often bizarre and sometimes humorous effects of their neurological disorders. Sachs, again much like Selzer, is much more than a reporter, but a poet, a writer of vivid prose, not only bringing science to the layman but making it live for all.

Terrible narrator, opposite of Sacks himself

What didn’t you like about Jonathan Davis and Oliver Sacks (Introduction) ’s performance?

I enjoyed the book itself, and I love Oliver Sacks, but this is one of the worst narrations I've heard on Audible. If you've ever heard Sacks, he sounds relaxed, conversational, and enthusiastic. Jonathan Davis sounds stuffy, monotonous, airless and slow. So slow! His total lack of enthusiasm is so much the opposite of Sacks I was shocked through the whole first hour of the book, and would have stopped if I didn't like the book so much. He reads the parts of the book that should be light and humorous no differently than the parts that are more somber. He sounds like the stereotype of a bad professor lecturing about something he doesn't care about any more, just to fill up some lecture time.

Insightful.

The book has made me more aware of the varied neurological disorders. Where once I was afraid of people when I noticed disorders, Oliver Sachs has helped me to become compassionately aware and not afraid of differences.

interesting stories but boring at times

I truly enjoyed listening to the stories about the patients, but got bored listening to his technical/medical terminology. Also his use of terms that are no longer politically correct, such as "retarded" and "idiot" made me cringe, even though I know he wrote the stories in the 80s!

supper interesting! I would definitely recommend!

I was already recommending this book before I finished it. I re-read chapters before I was done. I'm not a doctor or even a nurse, but I enjoyed this book because it was easy to understand. you don't need to be a doctor to understand it. I enjoy life's wonders and this is just a peek of how amazing and complex our minds can be and how little we really know about it!

A beautiful masterpiece

This book is a fantastic for all students of the mind and laymen alike.

Bizarre and Touching

If you have a fascination with the peculiar, this book will captivate you. This is the second time I've read it, and the style Sacks uses is elegant with exactness; he mixes neurological jargon and beautiful metaphors such that both the pedant and Joe-blow can cherish it equally. His case studies show an appreciation for the human and scientific, rarer than a FIVE leaf clover.