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An Anthropologist on Mars
- Seven Paradoxical Tales
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis, Oliver Sacks
- Length: 11 hrs and 42 mins
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Awakenings - which inspired the major motion picture - is the remarkable story of a group of patients who contracted sleeping sickness during the great epidemic just after World War I. Frozen for decades in a trance-like state, these men and women were given up as hopeless until 1969, when Dr. Oliver Sacks gave them the then-new drug L-DOPA, which had an astonishing, explosive, "awakening" effect. Dr. Sacks recounts the moving case histories of his patients, their lives, and their extraordinary transformations.
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Absolute classic!
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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.
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Same ole Sacks--great yarns as usual.
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On the Move
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From its opening minutes on his youthful obsession with motorcycles and speed, On the Move is infused with his restless energy. As he recounts his experiences as a young neurologist in the early 1960s, first in California, where he struggled with drug addiction, and then in New York, where he discovered a long-forgotten illness in the back wards of a chronic hospital, we see how his engagement with patients comes to define his life.
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His Own Life
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In Seeing Voices, Oliver Sacks turns his attention to the subject of deafness, and the result is a deeply felt portrait of a minority struggling for recognition and respect - a minority with its own rich, sometimes astonishing, culture and unique visual language, an extraordinary mode of communication that tells us much about the basis of language in hearing people as well.
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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.
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I rarely stop reading a book halfway through...
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Dr. Oliver Sacks argues the migraine cannot be understood simply as an illness, but must be viewed as a complex condition with a unique role to play in each individual's life.
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Why is this an audio book?
- By BW724 on 06-25-19
By: Oliver Sacks
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Overall
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Awakenings - which inspired the major motion picture - is the remarkable story of a group of patients who contracted sleeping sickness during the great epidemic just after World War I. Frozen for decades in a trance-like state, these men and women were given up as hopeless until 1969, when Dr. Oliver Sacks gave them the then-new drug L-DOPA, which had an astonishing, explosive, "awakening" effect. Dr. Sacks recounts the moving case histories of his patients, their lives, and their extraordinary transformations.
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Absolute classic!
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Same ole Sacks--great yarns as usual.
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His Own Life
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A Rich Experience
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Hallucinations don’t belong wholly to the insane. Much more commonly, they are linked to sensory deprivation, intoxication, illness, or injury. Here Dr. Sacks weaves together stories of his patients and of his own mind-altering experiences to illuminate what hallucinations tell us about the organization and structure of our brains, how they have influenced every culture’s folklore and art, and why the potential for hallucination is present in us all.
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Not Just Hallucinations
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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.
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A deeply moving testimony and celebration of how to embrace life. No writer has succeeded in capturing the medical and human drama of illness as honestly and as eloquently as Oliver Sacks. During the last few months of his life, he wrote a set of essays in which he movingly explored his feelings about completing a life and coming to terms with his own death.
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To the Point, Yet Told From the Heart
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A collection of essays that displays Oliver Sacks' passionate engagement with the most compelling and seminal ideas of human endeavor: evolution, creativity, memory, time, consciousness, and experience. The River of Consciousness is one of two books Sacks was working on up to his death, and it reveals his ability to make unexpected connections, his sheer joy in knowledge, and his unceasing, timeless project to understand what makes us human.
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Important but Less Interesting
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Everything in Its Place
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From the best-selling author of Gratitude and On the Move, a final volume of essays that showcase Sacks's broad range of interests - from his passion for ferns, swimming, and horsetails, to his final case histories exploring schizophrenia, dementia, and Alzheimer's.
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Missing Sacks
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Uncle Tungsten
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Long before Oliver Sacks became a distinguished neurologist and best-selling writer, he was a small English boy fascinated by metals - also by chemical reactions (the louder and smellier the better), photography, squids and cuttlefish, H.G. Wells, and the periodic table. In this endlessly charming and eloquent memoir, the he chronicles his love affair with science and the magnificently odd and sometimes harrowing childhood in which that love affair unfolded.
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FOR COMMITED LOVERS OF OLIVER SACKS WORK
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Robert Sapolsky’s Behave, his now classic account of why humans do good and why they do bad, pointed toward an unsettling conclusion: We may not grasp the precise marriage of nature and nurture that creates the physics and chemistry at the base of human behavior, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Now, in Determined, Sapolsky takes his argument all the way, mounting a brilliant (and in his inimitable way, delightful) full-frontal assault on the pleasant fantasy that there is some separate self telling our biology what to do.
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Abridged - no Appendix!
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What is autism: a lifelong disability or a naturally occurring form of cognitive difference akin to certain forms of genius? In truth, it is both of these things and more - and the future of our society depends on our understanding it. Wired reporter Steve Silberman unearths the secret history of autism, long suppressed by the same clinicians who became famous for discovering it, and finds surprising answers to the crucial question of why the number of diagnoses has soared in recent years.
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The long hard road to proper identity on the Autistic spectrum.
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A Leg to Stand On
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Overall
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Performance
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Dr. Oliver Sacks's books Awakenings, An Anthropologist on Mars and the best-selling The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat have been acclaimed for their compassion in the treatment of patients affected with profound disorders. In A Leg to Stand On, it is Sacks himself who is the patient: an encounter with a bull on a desolate mountain in Norway has left him with a severely damaged leg. But what should be a routine recuperation is actually the beginning of a strange medical journey.
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Not sure what he was trying for here
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Oliver Sacks is well known as an explorer of the human mind - a neurologist with a gift for complex, insightful portrayals of people and their conditions. However, he is also a card-carrying member of the American Fern Society, and since childhood has been fascinated by these primitive plants and their ability to survive and adapt in many climates. Oaxaca Journal is Sacks' spellbinding account of his trip with a group of fellow fern enthusiasts to the beautiful, history-steeped province of Oaxaca, Mexico.
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A gem
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Early studies of the human brain used a simple method: Wait for misfortune to strike - strokes, seizures, infectious diseases, horrendous accidents - and see how victims coped. In many cases their survival was miraculous, if puzzling. Observers were amazed by the transformations that took place when different parts of the brain were destroyed, altering victims' personalities. With the lucid, masterful explanations and razor-sharp wit his fans have come to expect, Kean explores the brain's secret passageways.
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Detailed but not overly Technical
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By: Sam Kean
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Thinking in Pictures
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- Length: 9 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Temple Grandin, Ph.D., is a gifted animal scientist who has designed one third of all the livestock-handling facilities in the United States. She also lectures widely on autism - because Temple Grandin is autistic, a woman who thinks, feels, and experiences the world in ways that are incomprehensible to the rest of us.
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Interesting look Inside Autism
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By: Temple Grandin
Publisher's summary
To these seven narratives of neurological disorder, Dr. Sacks brings the same humanity, poetic observation, and infectious sense of wonder that are apparent in his best sellers Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. These men, women, and one extraordinary child emerge as brilliantly adaptive personalities, whose conditions have not so much debilitated them as ushered them into another reality.
PLEASE NOTE: Some changes have been made to the original manuscript with the permission of Oliver Sacks.
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Alva Noë is one of a new breed - part philosopher, part cognitive scientist, part neuroscientist - who are radically altering the study of consciousness by asking difficult questions and pointing out obvious flaws in the current science. In Out of Our Heads, he restates and reexamines the problem of consciousness, and then proposes a startling solution: Do away with the 200-year-old paradigm that places consciousness within the confines of the brain.
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A bold, yet ultimately unsupported, hypothesis
- By Keith Pyne-Howarth on 01-17-10
By: Alva Noe
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The Gift of Adversity
- The Unexpected Benefits of Life's Difficulties, Setbacks, and Imperfections
- By: Norman E. Rosenthal M.D.
- Narrated by: Erik Synnestvedt
- Length: 10 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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The noted research psychiatrist explores how life's disappointments and difficulties provide us with the lessons we need to become better, bigger, and more resilient human beings. Adversity is an irreducible fact of life. Although we can and should learn from all experiences, both positive and negative best-selling author Dr. Norman E. Rosenthal believes that adversity is by far the best teacher most of us will ever encounter.
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Book ruined by the narrator
- By David C. on 12-07-22
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Already Here
- A Doctor Discovers the Truth About Heaven
- By: Leo Galland M.D.
- Narrated by: Leo Galland M.D.
- Length: 4 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Already Here tells of the death of Leo Galland's son, Christopher, at age 22; the direct visual evidence Christopher showed Leo that our souls do go on; and the communications from Christopher's spirit that changed Leo's understanding of life and its meaning. In life, Christopher was a brain-damaged special-needs child who challenged everyone he knew with unpredictable behavior and uncanny insights. After his death, he revealed to Leo the real purpose of his life, as a spiritual guide who taught others by confounding their assumptions and expectations.
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I needed this book. thanks Doctor.
- By Anonymous User on 08-08-18
By: Leo Galland M.D.
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A General Theory of Love
- By: Richard Lannon MD, Thomas Lewis MD, Fari Amini MD
- Narrated by: Chris Sorensen
- Length: 8 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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This original and lucid account of the complexities of love and its essential role in human well-being draws on the latest scientific research. Three eminent psychiatrists tackle the difficult task of reconciling what artists and thinkers have known for thousands of years about the human heart with what has only recently been learned about the primitive functions of the human brain.
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Great subject matter-hard to listen to
- By Laurel on 07-22-19
By: Richard Lannon MD, and others
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Permanent Present Tense
- The Unforgettable Life of the Amnesic Patient, H.M.
- By: Suzanne Corkin
- Narrated by: Pam Ward
- Length: 13 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Permanent Present Tense tells the incredible story of Henry Gustav Molaison, known only as H. M. until his death in 2008. In 1953, at the age of 27, Molaison underwent a dangerous "psychosurgical" procedure intended to alleviate his debilitating epilepsy. The surgery went horribly wrong, and when Molaison awoke he was unable to store new experiences. For the rest of his life, he would be trapped in the moment. But Molaison’s tragedy would prove a gift to humanity.
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Read Luke Dittrich's "Patient H.M." first...
- By Douglas on 11-07-16
By: Suzanne Corkin
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Known and Strange Things
- Essays
- By: Teju Cole
- Narrated by: Peter Jay Fernandez
- Length: 12 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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With this collection of more than 50 pieces on politics, photography, travel, history, and literature, Teju Cole solidifies his place as one of today's most powerful and original voices. Minute after minute, deploying prose dense with beauty and ideas, he finds fresh and potent ways to interpret art, people, and historical moments, taking in subjects from Virginia Woolf, Shakespeare, and W. G. Sebald to Instagram, Barack Obama, and Boko Haram.
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A Book that Teaches and Shares
- By Carolyn J. on 10-08-17
By: Teju Cole
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Mindsight
- The New Science of Personal Transformation
- By: Daniel J. Siegel
- Narrated by: Daniel J. Siegel
- Length: 11 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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A Harvard-trained physician, Dr. Siegel is one of the revolutionary global innovators in the integration of brain science into the practice of psychotherapy. Using case histories from his practice, he shows how, by following the proper steps, nearly everyone can learn how to focus their attention on the internal world of the mind in a way that will literally change the wiring and architecture of their brain.
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DO NOT MISS THIS BOOK!
- By Annie M. on 02-24-10
By: Daniel J. Siegel
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Where the Heart Beats
- John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists
- By: Kay Larson
- Narrated by: Jason Wineinger
- Length: 15 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Composer John Cage sought the silence of a mind at peace with itself - and found it in Zen Buddhism, a spiritual path that changed both his music and his view of the universe. "Remarkably researched, exquisitely written", Where the Heart Beats weaves together "a great many threads of cultural history" (Maria Popova, Brain Pickings) to illuminate Cage’s struggle to accept himself and his relationship with choreographer Merce Cunningham. Freed to be his own man, Cage originated exciting experiments that set him at the epicenter of a new avant-garde forming in the 1950s.
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Mind Expansion
- By Robert Keith on 04-04-15
By: Kay Larson
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Hallucinations don’t belong wholly to the insane. Much more commonly, they are linked to sensory deprivation, intoxication, illness, or injury. Here Dr. Sacks weaves together stories of his patients and of his own mind-altering experiences to illuminate what hallucinations tell us about the organization and structure of our brains, how they have influenced every culture’s folklore and art, and why the potential for hallucination is present in us all.
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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.
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I rarely stop reading a book halfway through...
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Dr. Oliver Sacks's books Awakenings, An Anthropologist on Mars and the best-selling The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat have been acclaimed for their compassion in the treatment of patients affected with profound disorders. In A Leg to Stand On, it is Sacks himself who is the patient: an encounter with a bull on a desolate mountain in Norway has left him with a severely damaged leg. But what should be a routine recuperation is actually the beginning of a strange medical journey.
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Not sure what he was trying for here
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Everything in Its Place
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From the best-selling author of Gratitude and On the Move, a final volume of essays that showcase Sacks's broad range of interests - from his passion for ferns, swimming, and horsetails, to his final case histories exploring schizophrenia, dementia, and Alzheimer's.
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Missing Sacks
- By Brandy on 12-02-19
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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.
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Same ole Sacks--great yarns as usual.
- By Rlelli07 on 10-26-10
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Awakenings
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Awakenings - which inspired the major motion picture - is the remarkable story of a group of patients who contracted sleeping sickness during the great epidemic just after World War I. Frozen for decades in a trance-like state, these men and women were given up as hopeless until 1969, when Dr. Oliver Sacks gave them the then-new drug L-DOPA, which had an astonishing, explosive, "awakening" effect. Dr. Sacks recounts the moving case histories of his patients, their lives, and their extraordinary transformations.
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Absolute classic!
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Not Just Hallucinations
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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.
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I rarely stop reading a book halfway through...
- By Rusty on 09-04-15
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A Leg to Stand On
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Dr. Oliver Sacks's books Awakenings, An Anthropologist on Mars and the best-selling The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat have been acclaimed for their compassion in the treatment of patients affected with profound disorders. In A Leg to Stand On, it is Sacks himself who is the patient: an encounter with a bull on a desolate mountain in Norway has left him with a severely damaged leg. But what should be a routine recuperation is actually the beginning of a strange medical journey.
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Not sure what he was trying for here
- By John S. on 08-17-11
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Missing Sacks
- By Brandy on 12-02-19
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Same ole Sacks--great yarns as usual.
- By Rlelli07 on 10-26-10
By: Oliver Sacks
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Awakenings
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Awakenings - which inspired the major motion picture - is the remarkable story of a group of patients who contracted sleeping sickness during the great epidemic just after World War I. Frozen for decades in a trance-like state, these men and women were given up as hopeless until 1969, when Dr. Oliver Sacks gave them the then-new drug L-DOPA, which had an astonishing, explosive, "awakening" effect. Dr. Sacks recounts the moving case histories of his patients, their lives, and their extraordinary transformations.
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Absolute classic!
- By Douglas on 09-01-12
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Gratitude
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A deeply moving testimony and celebration of how to embrace life. No writer has succeeded in capturing the medical and human drama of illness as honestly and as eloquently as Oliver Sacks. During the last few months of his life, he wrote a set of essays in which he movingly explored his feelings about completing a life and coming to terms with his own death.
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To the Point, Yet Told From the Heart
- By LJT on 01-18-16
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Uncle Tungsten
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Long before Oliver Sacks became a distinguished neurologist and best-selling writer, he was a small English boy fascinated by metals - also by chemical reactions (the louder and smellier the better), photography, squids and cuttlefish, H.G. Wells, and the periodic table. In this endlessly charming and eloquent memoir, the he chronicles his love affair with science and the magnificently odd and sometimes harrowing childhood in which that love affair unfolded.
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FOR COMMITED LOVERS OF OLIVER SACKS WORK
- By Jeff on 05-02-12
By: Oliver Sacks
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Migraine
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Dr. Oliver Sacks argues the migraine cannot be understood simply as an illness, but must be viewed as a complex condition with a unique role to play in each individual's life.
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Why is this an audio book?
- By BW724 on 06-25-19
By: Oliver Sacks
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Seeing Voices
- A Journey Into the World of the Deaf
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In Seeing Voices, Oliver Sacks turns his attention to the subject of deafness, and the result is a deeply felt portrait of a minority struggling for recognition and respect - a minority with its own rich, sometimes astonishing, culture and unique visual language, an extraordinary mode of communication that tells us much about the basis of language in hearing people as well.
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A Rich Experience
- By Douglas on 11-27-12
By: Oliver Sacks
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Musicophilia
- Tales of Music and the Brain
- By: Oliver Sacks
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 11 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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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.
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The Best Of Sacks...
- By Douglas on 11-23-12
By: Oliver Sacks
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On the Move
- A Life
- By: Oliver Sacks
- Narrated by: Dan Woren
- Length: 11 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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From its opening minutes on his youthful obsession with motorcycles and speed, On the Move is infused with his restless energy. As he recounts his experiences as a young neurologist in the early 1960s, first in California, where he struggled with drug addiction, and then in New York, where he discovered a long-forgotten illness in the back wards of a chronic hospital, we see how his engagement with patients comes to define his life.
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His Own Life
- By Garance on 05-13-15
By: Oliver Sacks
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Oaxaca Journal
- By: Oliver Sacks
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis, Oliver Sacks - introduction
- Length: 4 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Oliver Sacks is well known as an explorer of the human mind - a neurologist with a gift for complex, insightful portrayals of people and their conditions. However, he is also a card-carrying member of the American Fern Society, and since childhood has been fascinated by these primitive plants and their ability to survive and adapt in many climates. Oaxaca Journal is Sacks' spellbinding account of his trip with a group of fellow fern enthusiasts to the beautiful, history-steeped province of Oaxaca, Mexico.
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A gem
- By Daniela on 06-04-15
By: Oliver Sacks
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The River of Consciousness
- By: Oliver Sacks
- Narrated by: Dan Woren, Kate Edgar
- Length: 5 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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A collection of essays that displays Oliver Sacks' passionate engagement with the most compelling and seminal ideas of human endeavor: evolution, creativity, memory, time, consciousness, and experience. The River of Consciousness is one of two books Sacks was working on up to his death, and it reveals his ability to make unexpected connections, his sheer joy in knowledge, and his unceasing, timeless project to understand what makes us human.
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Important but Less Interesting
- By Michael on 11-16-17
By: Oliver Sacks
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Regarding the Pain of Others
- By: Susan Sontag
- Narrated by: Jennifer Van Dyck
- Length: 2 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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How does the spectacle of the sufferings of others affect us? Are viewers inured - or incited - to violence by the depiction of cruelty? Susan Sontag here takes a fresh look at the representation of atrocity - from Goya's The Disasters of War to photographs of the American Civil War, lynchings of Blacks in the South, and the Nazi death camps, and to more contemporary horrific images of Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Israel, and Palestine, as well as New York City on September 11, 2001.
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Terrible recording
- By Vandra on 02-16-12
By: Susan Sontag
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Musicophilia
- Tales of Music and the Brain
- By: Oliver Sacks
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- Abridged
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Oliver Sacks' 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. In Musicophilia, he examines the powers of music through the individual experiences of patients, musicians, and everyday people. He explores how catchy tunes can subject us to hours of mental replay, and how a surprising number of people acquire nonstop musical hallucinations that assault them night and day. Yet far more frequently, music goes right....
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This is an ABRIDGED version.
- By Amazon Customer on 07-09-20
By: Oliver Sacks
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The Emotional Brain
- The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life
- By: Joseph Ledoux
- Narrated by: Graham Rowat
- Length: 10 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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What happens in our brains to make us feel fear, love, hate, anger, joy? Do we control our emotions, or do they control us? Do animals have emotions? How can traumatic experiences in early childhood influence adult behavior, even though we have no conscious memory of them? In The Emotional Brain, Joseph LeDoux investigates the origins of human emotions and explains that many exist as part of complex neural systems that evolved to enable us to survive.
By: Joseph Ledoux
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Unthinkable
- An Extraordinary Journey Through the World's Strangest Brains
- By: Helen Thomson
- Narrated by: Helen Thomson
- Length: 7 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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A prize-winning journalist with a background in neuroscience, Helen Thomson spent years tracking down people who live with the world's most extraordinary neurological disorders - like a man who tried to break his back because his legs no longer felt like his own, and another who believed that he was dead for nine years. Not content to simply read about these cases on paper, Thomson reached out to 10 people with these afflictions, and they agreed to tell her their stories.
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Very interesting
- By Ruthi on 07-01-19
By: Helen Thomson
What listeners say about An Anthropologist on Mars
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- Jeff
- 09-22-13
SACKS IS AN ABSOLUTE JOY !!
. The jaw dropping stories in this book mated to Sack`s insight, sensitivity, and remarkable articulation are a balm for the soul and candy for the mind. His humanity and his remarkable ability to communicate the experiences of his patients and his own insight make him unique and unforgetable.
The underlying premise for all these cases which sacks brings to light- is the unusual and unforeseen positive path the disabilities of these patients and disabilities in general can (after breaking through) engender.
I am similar to those stories enclosed-in a way. 10 yrs ago I stepped out of the shower heard a crack and have been in terrible crippling disabling pain ever since. I went from being a very fit,strong and super active father of 2 very small boys to being bedridden and writhing in pain.. Things are marginally better now,but the point is- I started using audible books at the start because I couldnt do anything else-including tv. Audible books not only helped me endure the isolation, pain and loss of a way of life-it replaced my physical world with a mental one (generalization)-one in which I'm now relatively happy. This totally unexpected and unforeseen journey from one state of being to another positive state, is part of what is explored in this book. It is no exaggeration to say that audible books saved my life.
I'm not sure just where this book fits into his bibliography, I've read them as I've come across them. and have pretty much enjoyed them all. The narrator (Jonathan Davis) who has done most if not all his books when sacks hasn't done the work himself is utterly perfect, getting the tone, timing and inflection just right.
This book enriched my mind and soul,altered my perspective and relieved the mind numbing effect of a shockingly dumbed down world- at least for a few hours. Now that's credit worthy!!
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92 people found this helpful
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- M. Levine
- 01-21-13
Dr. Sacks is Fascinating
Now I want to be a neurologist. Too bad my only qualifications are listening to Oliver Sacks' books... I would have been great!
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23 people found this helpful
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- serine
- 02-02-16
Wonderfully unusual cases
Oliver sacks provides entertaining and informative stories of people living with various brain abnormalities. In this book, sacks focused on abnormalities that often compelled the individual to record their environment in extreme ways. For example, Sacks suggest maybe we are all hardwired for recording history, since our only tools for millions of years were our brains and voices, and we handed down an oral history of human existence, throughout the generations. However, in some individuals, the areas responsible for this are overly active, and often the other parts of the brain are under-active. This results in echolalia, a perfect recording of the environment that can be reproduced over and over, a perfect memory that can produce drawings of whole cities-- even years after the artist saw it, a replication of various sounds-- such as instruments, an obsession on preserving the past-- as with someone stuck in the past and unable to live in the present day.
Sacks also gives a wonderful account of his interviews and examinations of Temple Grandin. Instead of seeing her brain as defective, Sacks truly wants to understand how she might simply think differently. Even when Grandin herself views her brain as defective, it is clear Sacks is more interested in understanding the way her brain works than he is in judging if it's defective or not.
Sacks is an excellent writer. The pages flew by and in no time, the book was sadly over. I love him so much; time to start a new Sacks book.
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18 people found this helpful
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- Douglas
- 09-12-12
Sachs The Scientist
Some readers complain of the overly metaphysical nature of Oliver Sachs' The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat (and I do agree that he seems to mistake, surprisingly often for such an educated man, "personality" for "the soul" in that book and that he does ramble a bit into the etheric realms in "Hat," clouding his scientific points.) For those, I would recommend Anthropologist on Mars. This is the best of Sachs, as he returns to what makes Awakenings so good to read: it brings complex medicine to the layman's terms (without dumbing down) and it includes the human element of neurology and neurological conditions without the threats of floating off into abstract philosophy as in "Hat."
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18 people found this helpful
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- Toonie R
- 09-30-17
Too repetitive
The intro part goes on and on with repetitive information and you hear it first in the voice of Oliver Sacks and then most of the same stuff, some verbatim the same, in the voice of Jonathan Davis. All the case histories were interesting but I got bored about halfway through each one due to the repetition of observations.
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14 people found this helpful
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- Julie
- 03-05-15
Enlightening and Inspiring
I really like listening to Oliver Sack's books; the narrators help bring the anecdotes to life and present the drier explanations of neurological anatomy and science clearly (and allow me to drift a bit, without completely skipping material which is fascinating, but fairly difficult).
This book focuses on the inspiring abilities of several individuals to live with and positively leverage potentially debilitating neurological disorders. While I've seen other material about Temple Grandin and Steven Wiltshire, I really appreciated the more in-depth and intimate information about how they and the other "Martians" in this book live, apply their exceptional talents, and face the existential challenge of being so very different in a society where "difference" is not understood, accommodated, or accepted.
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14 people found this helpful
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- Michael
- 04-24-16
Good Brain Book
This is not one of my favorite Oliver Sacks books. The tone is a bit more personal and less technical than some of the other books and I found the case studies a bit less fascinating than his earlier books. Nevertheless these books always get me thinking and this book was no exception. I find these case studies of the effects of specific kinds of brain damage are useful in evaluating various theories of brain function and even theories about artificial intelligence. I particularly found the interview with Temple Grandin thought provoking.
If you have liked the author's previous books you will probably like this one as well, just not quite as much.
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- PhreshMeet
- 09-20-17
First two stories are great
He tends to go and on. The first two stories are fascinating. The others not so much.
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- Jessica Smith
- 05-18-21
Good performance; insights dated
I have read or listened to almost all of Sacks's work and consider myself a fan. In this collection, he has some interesting insights about memory. But the collection was published in 1995 and there has been major progress in the way we understand and treat autism (it's 2021). The last couple of chapters feel really dated and even offensive in their lack of understanding/empathy toward the subjects-- even if this was perhaps groundbreaking at the time.
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- Cloudy
- 04-30-18
Anthropologist with a philosopher’s mind
This is the kind of book you wish you had read with others merely because it has revelations and insights everyone should have and you want everyone to have them with you.
Some parts feel like anthropological Notes, others medical, others like the intimate impressions in a poetic diary, and you’re not sure as a reader if you’ve just experienced a new revelation or something that you understood all along.
Oliver Sacks is one of a kind. I miss him greatly.
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