The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat - (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics) by Oliver Sacks (Hardcover)

About the Book

Originally published in the UK: London: Gerald Duckworth, 1985. Originally published in the US: New York: Summit Books, 1985.

Book Synopsis

THE INSPIRATION FOR THE NBC SERIES BRILLIANT MINDS - A Contemporary Classics hardcover edition of Dr. Sacks's most extraordinary book, in which the "poet laureate of medicine" (The New York Times) recounts fascinating case histories of patients with neurological disorders.

An influential landmark in the tradition of writing about the body and the brain, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat tells the stories of individuals afflicted with perceptual and intellectual disorders: 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; whose limbs seem alien to them; who lack some skills yet are gifted with uncanny artistic or mathematical talents.

In Dr. Sacks's splendid and sympathetic telling, his patients are deeply human and his tales are studies of struggles against incredible adversity. A great healer, Sacks never loses sight of medicine's ultimate responsibility: "the suffering, afflicted, fighting human subject."

Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.

Review Quotes

"Insightful, compassionate, moving . . . the lucidity and power of a gifted writer."
--The New York Times Book Review

"A provocative introduction to the human mind."
--St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"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

"This book is for everybody who has felt from time to time that certain twinge of self-identity and sensed how easily, at any moment, one might lose it."
--The Times

"Oliver Sacks has become the world's best-known neurologist. His case studies of broken minds offer brilliant insight into the mysteries of consciousness."
--The Guardian

"Populated by a cast as strange as that of the most fantastic fiction . . . Dr Sacks shows the awesome powers of our mind and just how delicately balanced they have to be."
--Sunday Times

"Sacks explores neurological disorders with a novelist's skill and an appreciation of his patients as human beings."
--Publishers Weekly

"Sensitive yet lively. . . . This book ranks with the very best of its genre. It will inform and entertain anyone, especially those who find medicine an intriguing and mysterious art."
--Kirkus Reviews

About the Author

OLIVER SACKS (1933-2015) was born in London and educated at Oxford University and UCLA. Dr. Sacks spent more than fifty years working as a neurologist and wrote many books about the neurological predicaments and conditions of his patients. He received honors from, among others, the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

About the Introducer: ATUL GAWANDE, a noted surgeon, writer, and researcher, is a professor at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health and at Harvard Medical School. He writes on medicine and public health for The New Yorker and Slate, and is the author of four books, including Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End. He is now assistant administrator of the United States Agency for International Development.