Oliver Sacks

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Maryland

A Life

When Oliver Sacks was twelve years old, a perceptive schoolmaster wrote in his report: "Sacks will go far, if he does not go too far." It is now abundantly clear that Sacks has never stopped going. From its opening pages 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. With unbridled honesty and humor, Sacks shows us that the same energy that drives his physical passions--weight lifting and swimming--also drives his cerebral passions. He writes about his love affairs, both romantic and intellectual; his guilt over leaving his family to come to America; his bond with his schizophrenic brother; and the writers and scientists--Thom Gunn, A. R. Luria, W. H. Auden, Gerald M. Edelman, Francis Crick--who influenced him. On the Move is the story of a brilliantly unconventional physician and writer--and of the man who has illuminated the many ways that the brain makes us human.

On the Move

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Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

Pennsylvania

Tales of Music and the Brain

The author draws on the individual experiences of patients, musicians, composers, and ordinary people to explore the complex human response to music and how music can affect those suffering from a variety of ailments.

Musicophilia

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Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Connecticut

Illinois

Virginia

Oliver Sachs

These books are in great condition. Last book was sliced by accident and you can see it in the last pictures. 

California

Hailed as a medical classic, and the subject of a major feature film as well as radio and stage plays, and various TV documentaries, Awakenings is the extraordinary account of a group of twenty patients. Rendered catatonic by the sleeping-sickness epidemic that swept the world just after the First World War, all twenty had spent forty years in hospital: motionless and speechless; aware of the world around them, but exhibiting no interest in it - until Dr Sacks administered the then-new drug, L-DOPA, which caused them, temporarily, to awake from their decades-long slumber.

Awakenings/Hallucinations/The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat

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With his trademark compassion and erudition, Oliver Sacks, whom The New York Times has called “the poet laureate of medicine,” explores the place music occupies in the brain and how it affects the human condition. In Musicophilia, he examines the powers of music through the individual experiences of patients, musicians, and everyday people. Among them: a surgeon who is struck by lightning and suddenly becomes obsessed with Chopin; people with “amusia,” to whom a symphony sounds like the clattering of pots and pans; and a man whose memory spand only seven seconds—for everything but music. Dr. Sacks describes how music can animate people with Parkinson’s disease who cannot otherwise move, give words to stroke patients who cannot otherwise speak, and calm and organize people who are deeply disoriented by Alzheimer’s or schizophrenia.

Music can be inspiring, moving us to the heights or depths of emotion—and it can also be our best medicine. In Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks tells us why.

New York

Kentucky

A Journey into the World of the Deaf

The bestselling author and "one of the greatest clinical writers of the twentieth century" (New York Times) explores the world of deafness and ponders the nature of human communication.

Seeing Voices

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Michigan

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Oregon

The River of Consciousness

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Massachusetts

Like The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, this is a fascinating voyage into a strange and wonderful land, a provocative meditation on communication, biology, adaptation, and culture.nbsp;nbsp;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. Seeing Voices is, as Studs Terkel has written, "an exquisite, as well as revelatory, work."

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.

The Island of the Colorblind

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Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Minnesota

And Other Clinical Tales

Presents a series of stories about men and women who, representing both medical and literary oddities, raise fundamental questions about the nature of reality

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

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"An explorer of that most wondrous of islands, the human brain," writes D.M. Thomas in The New York Times Book Review, "Oliver Sacks also loves the oceanic kind of islands." Both kinds figure movingly in this book--part travelogue, part autobiography, part medical mystery story--in which Sacks's journeys to a tiny Pacific atoll and the island of Guam become explorations of the meaning of islands, the genesis of disease, the wonders of botany, the nature of deep geological time, and the complexities of being human.

First Loves and Last Tales

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.

Oliver Sacks, scientist and storyteller, is beloved by readers for his neurological case histories and his fascination and familiarity with human behavior at its most unexpected and unfamiliar. Everything in Its Place is a celebration of Sacks's myriad interests, told with his characteristic compassion and erudition, and in his luminous prose.

Everything in Its Place

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Hallucinations don't belong wholly to the insane. They are commonly linked to sensory deprivation, intoxication, illness, or injury. For thousands of years, humans have used hallucinogenics to achieve them. Here, with elegance, curiosity, and compassion, Oliver Sacks weaves together stories of his patients and of his own mind-altering experiences to illuminate what hallucinations tell us about our brains, our culture, and ourselves. (Bestseller).

Hallucinations

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Seven Paradoxical Tales

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

An Anthropologist on Mars

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New Jersey

Missouri

Traces the stories of six individuals whose lives have been profoundly changed by unusual changes to essential senses and abilities, including a renowned pianist who lost the ability to read scores and a novelist whose ability to read was destroyed by a stroke.

The Mind's Eye

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Nebraska

Memories of a Chemical Boyhood

Long before Oliver Sacks became a distinguished neurologist and bestselling 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 author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Awakenings chronicles his love affair with science and the magnificently odd and sometimes harrowing childhood in which that love affair unfolded.

In Uncle Tungsten we meet Sacks' extraordinary family, from his surgeon mother (who introduces the fourteen-year-old Oliver to the art of human dissection) and his father, a family doctor who imbues in his son an early enthusiasm for housecalls, to his "Uncle Tungsten," whose factory produces tungsten-filament lightbulbs. We follow the young Oliver as he is exiled at the age of six to a grim, sadistic boarding school to escape the London Blitz, and later watch as he sets about passionately reliving the exploits of his chemical heroes-in his own home laboratory. Uncle Tungsten is a crystalline view of a brilliant young mind springing to life, a story of growing up which is by turns elegiac, comic, and wistful, full of the electrifying joy of discovery.

Uncle Tungsten

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Minor shelf wear on cover, no marks or creases on pages. Smoke-free home

Texas

Clinical tales, case history, neurological disorders, author of Awakening and a Leg to stand on Oliver Sacks.

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Oliver Sacks

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Musicophilia

Oliver Sacks

Awakenings/Hallucinations/The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat

Oliver Sacks

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Seeing Voices

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On the Move

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The River of Consciousness

Oliver Sacks

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The Island of the Colorblind

Oliver Sacks

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

Oliver Sacks

The Island of the Colorblind

Oliver Sacks

Everything in Its Place

Oliver Sacks

Hallucinations

Oliver Sacks

An Anthropologist on Mars

Oliver Sacks

An Anthropologist on Mars

Oliver Sacks

Musicophilia

Oliver Sacks

The Mind's Eye

Oliver Sacks

Uncle Tungsten

Oliver Sacks

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

Oliver Sacks

Hallucinations