Oliver Sacks Books

Co-narrated by Ron Halder and Donna White, "Memory Books" by Canadian mystery writer Howard Engel is the story of small-town private investigatory Benny Cooperman who, after being left for dead from a blow to the head by an unknown assailant, wakes up in a hospital and in the middle of a mystery. All Benny can remember is that he was close to figuring out a mystery but can't remember anything else - including the name of his girlfriend, Anna Abraham. To complicate things further, Benny is suffering from a brain injury that allows him to still write, but not be able to read! But with the help of Anna and the use of a small notepad dubbed the 'memory book', Benny engages in some dedicated bedside sleuthing. Author Howard Engel (who in real life suffers a similar brain injury to that of his lead character) has created a terrific 'who dunnit' style mystery with a medical theme that will engage the reader's total and rapt attention from beginning to end. Expertly abridged and originally broadcast on CBC Radio, "Memory Books" is especially recommended to mystery buffs and, with a total running time of 3 hours and 30 minutes, is a welcome addition to any community library audiobook CD collection..

Oliver Sachs was right. This mystery was approached from a whole new point of view. A detective with a memory problem from a head injury tries to solve the mystery of who and why he was nearly killed. The hospital is the main setting and we see the patient struggle to put things together with an impaired memory. I truly admired the fact that the author wrote this book with an impairment of his own.

When I heard about Howard Engel's stroke, I assumed that I would never see Benny Cooperman again. However, this author has done the seemingly impossible and given us another great story.
Memory Book is different from the other Cooperman novels because Benny has been afflicted with alexia, like Engel. Thus, quite a bit of time is spent with Benny in the hospital, learning how to cope with his altered abilities. However, Benny is just as nosy, persistent and peculiarly charming as ever. He enlists his visitors onto his sleuthing team. The mystery unravels alongside Benny's therapy.
We get to see some old, favourite characters and - of course - some new ones. Engel is a master at painting characters with details that leave you feeling you've met them somewhere before. Former Cooperman fan or not, I recommend you spend some time with Benny and his friends as they help to unravel the mystery and have some laughs along the way.

if you like Howard Engel and Benny, this is a must read!
I had no idea what had happened medically to Howard - so don't read the afterword by Oliver Sacks til AFTER. Let's just say that the fact that Howard even managed to write this book is truly remarkable and shows that he is indeed a master of the genre. The fact that it is a great book where I was totally hooked after 10 pages and the manner in which the plot unfolds - just read it - it's a remarkable achievement and I thank Howard for his courage.
Just watch out for those nap times...
jb

"Beyond Pain" is an informative and important book for any person in chronic pain. Well-written, readable, sensible, and up-to-date, it illuminates general aspects of pain theory and treatment while providing fascinating case studies / anecdotes. The mind and the body are shown to be not only interrelated but inseparable. And the qualifications of Dr. Mailis-Gagnon are indisputably impeccable.
I suffer from chronic pain myself. I have read a lot of books on chronic pain of various types, even a couple of medical texts, but I found this book newly informative and mind-expanding. This book is aimed to a general reader; no prior medical knowledge is assumed.
This book will be useful for anyone in chronic pain, including sufferers of fibromyalgia, myofascial or muscle pain, neuropathic or nerve pain, back pain; women, men, Canadians, whomever. It will even give you a few good laughs.
Three words: READ THIS BOOK!

Beyond Pain: Making The Mind-body Connection isn't a scholarly analysis of pain management but a set of firsthand stories of patients and problems which are used to illustrate the condition of chronic pain and the complexities surrounding its management. Case studies from the authors' own practices and experiences describes options, techniques to block pain, lasting effects of chronic pain, and how pain experiences differ between patients. A fine study which outlines many different causes, experiences, and solutions surrounding pain.

I read the first book that this volume contains on a short trip to Brussels. The images in the book captivated me more than the images around on the little holiday. I was sitting there in the Grand Square in Belgium, designed to be the most beautiful square in Europe, wanting to be in every moment where Sacks was. Everything in this book is put to the page with such elegance and beauty that I kept ranting about it to my girlfriend (to her annoyance). With some slight similarities to Douglas Adams' "Last Chance To See", this is one of the most wonderful books I've read in ages.

Oliver Sacks describes, in beautiful depth, his childhood love of islands and his fascination with, in particular, the ancient cycad trees. He embarks on a expedition to the islands of the Pacific in order to research two extraordinary phenomena - a population which is largely achromatopic (colour-blind) and an island on which the causes of a mysterious paralysis have eluded scientists for decades. At the same time, he reveals his innate biophilia - an appreciation of life and the living world - which he believes is present to some degree in all men. He expresses this sentiment in many ways - in his sympathy towards his patients and his efforts to understand both their afflictions and their culture, and in his vivid description of the tropical plant and marine life which he beholds around him. The book contains a large section of well-researched footnotes, which indicate Oliver Sacks' extensive knowledge on the history and anthropology of these isolated populations. For all those with, as the author might say, even a slight degree of biophilia, this book should provide an interesting and informative account of the curious evolution of life on these islands of the Pacific.

A Journey Round My Skull appears (based on reviews and cover blurbs) to be a classic of the 'sick patient' genre. I'm not exactly sure why. I found it to be a little challenging to stick with to the end. Part of the problem is the stilted translation from Karinthy's native language. It never flows well and reads very much like a translation inasmuch as the english phrases seem awkward, rough and not-quite-right. I almost never forgot that I was in fact reading a translation -- surely a sign of a less than stellar job.

That aside, Karinthy's style never really caught on with me. What I expected to be a straight-up tale of what happens to a patient with a brain tumor saddled with diagnosis and treatment using only mid-20th century technology, turned out to be a more dreamlike, stream of consciousness experience that was often a little confusing. Also surprising was Karinthy's baffling attitude at being stricken with a brain tumor. Never did he admit to self-pity, sadness or fear for the future. Instead he tells his story from a detached, "what will be will be" perspective. It's rather hard for me to imagine facing blindness and possible death with such a cavalier attitude. I question if he really did either.

Oliver Sacks makes the case for the book much better than I can. In his new introduction, he writes, "I first read A Journey Round My Skull as a boy of thirteen or fourteen -- I think it influenced me, when I came to write my own neurological case histories -- and now, rereading it sixty years later, I think it stands up remarkably well. It is not just an elaborate case history; it depicts the complex impact of a sight-, mind-, and life-threatening illness in a man of extraordinary sensibility and talent, and even something approaching genius, in the prime of his life. It becomes a journey of insight, of symbolic stages. It has its faults: there are long digressions, philosophical and literary, and there is a certain amount of fanciful contrivance and extravagance -- though this is something that Karinthy becomes more and more conscious of as he writes the book, as he is sobered by his experience, and as he tried to weld his novelistic imagination to the factual, even the clinical, realities of his situation. But despite its flaws, Karinthy's book is, to my mind, a masterpiece. We are inundated now with medical memoirs, both biographical and autobiographical -- the entire genre has exploded in the last twenty years. Yet even though medical technology may have changed, the human experience has not, and A Journey Round My Skull, the first autobiographical description of a journey inside the brain, remains one of the very best."

In the spring of 1936, Frigyes (Frederic) Karinthy, a popular Hungarian poet, heard locomotives rumbling, reverberating, dying away. He knew there had been no trains on the streets of Budapest for 40 years. After long, exhaustive examinations Budapest neurologists told him that an egg-sized cyst webbed with tiny blood vessels was sprouting on the right side of his brain, back of his cerebellum. Karinthy's wife took him to Stockholm and Dr. Herbert Olivecrona.

Oliver Sachks asks: "Were doctors in Budapest in 1936, worse than doctors in, say, New York or London seventy years later? ... [O]ne needs to remember ... how difficult and delicate an art it was, seventy years ago, to diagnose and locate a cerebral tumor." Ether could not be used -- it would congest brain blood vessels. Karinthy remained awake during the operation. This book is the first patient's account of a brain operation in medical history.

Much of the book is autobiographical, but in chapter "Avdeling 13" Karinthy describes the operation itself.

"I felt them wheel me under the lamp. I felt a succession of little pricks in a wide circle ... on my head. Then . . . one long horizontal incision at the back of my neck. This did not hurt me either. I felt soft gestures, as if my flesh were being opened and folded back.

"There was a sudden jerk as if [Dr. Olivecrona] had seized the opening with a pair of forceps. It was followed by a straining sensation, a feeling of pressure, a cracking sound, and a terrific wrench. . . . Something broke with a dull noise. . . . Each cracking sound reminded me of taking the lid off a jamjar, while the process as a whole was like splitting open a wooden packing case, plank by plank. . . .

"A veritable fury of destruction seized hold of me. Break it up! I wanted to shout. Smash away! Bust it to bits! Everything had gone red in front of my eyes. If I had had an axe or a lump of iron in my hand I should have hit out with it and smashed up myself and everyone else with the wild recklessness of a maniac.

"Once the trephining of the skull was over . . . my mood underwent a change. There was a sound of pumping and draining and I could hear the drip, drip of a liquid. Although my brain didn't hurt at all, it did hurt me when one of the instruments fell on to the glass with a sharp, metallic sound. A certain idea passing through my mind hurt me too. It had nothing to do with my present situation. . . ."

Three hours after the operation began, the poet lost consciousness. Three weeks later, Karinthy went back to his Budapest cafés, and heard no more nonexistent locomotives.

His report from the operating table is compelling, and the autobiographical sections are also interesting as. "I felt absolutely at peace. This was no longer my whole life; it was just one afternoon. It might be that I was very ill. Perhaps I was even going to die. Yet this had nothing to do with that afternoon, nor I with the man born to sorrow from the day he came into the world."

And again: "Throughout nature, every living body has two aspects--one connected with its private functions and individual life, and one which we may call the sexual. Each of our organs has likewise two aspects, adapted for completely different purposes. Thus, the eye is not merely an instrument of vision, but an alluring jewel, an ever-burning lamp, whose sparkle inflames the opposite sex."

Finally: "Reality as a genre requires no helping hand from the artist."

This book makes a great companion to My Stroke of Insight by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor who writes about her journey inside her brain. Both are compelling reading.

It reveals a wonderful way of discovering and loving chemistry, showing that it's everywhere.

"It often happens that the mind of a person who is learning a new science, has to pass through all the phases which the science itself has exhibited in its historical evolution." (Stanislao Cannizzaro, Italian chemist, 1826 - 1910).

These words had a powerful resonance for Oliver Sacks. When the gifted neurologist wrote his autobiography, he also wrote a history of chemistry as recapitulated through his own childhood experiences. He grew up in a very scientific family--his mother and father were physicians, and his uncle Dave (the 'Uncle Tungsten' of the title) was both a chemist and a business entrepreneur, who "would spend hundreds of hours watching all the processes in his factories: the sintering and drawing of the tungsten, the making of the coiled coils and molybdenum supports for the filaments, the filling of the bulbs with argon..."

Uncle Tungsten allowed his nephew to perform chemical experiments in his laboratory, which contained samples of almost every element. Oliver's "physics uncle," Uncle Abe had a small telescopic observatory on top of his house, where he demonstrated the wonders of spectroscopy to his nephew: "The whole visible universe--planets, stars, distant galaxies--presented itself for spectroscopic analysis, and I got a vertiginous, almost ecstatic satisfaction from seeing familiar terrestrial elements out in space, seeing what I had known only intellectually before, that the elements were not just terrestrial but cosmic, were indeed the building blocks of the universe."

No wonder young Oliver grew up with a love for the elements and their chemistry!

Rarely do I read an autobiography and envy the author his childhood--most recent examples of this genre, e.g. "A Child Called 'It'" are grim, wailing texts--and that's not to say that Oliver didn't have his bad moments, too. He endured two horrible years at a Dickensian boarding school while London was being bombed by the Germans. For the most part though, his formative years were spent in a fantastic 'castle of the elements' where his "many uncles and aunts and cousins served as a sort of archive or reference library" to his enquiring mind.

In "Uncle Tungsten," Dr. Sacks shares his learning experiences with us and in the process, writes a far more lucid history of chemistry and physics than any I've ever found in a textbook. He also takes his readers on a mesmerizing, personalized tour of the elements. If you enjoyed P.W. Atkin's quirky "The Periodic Kingdom" or Primo Levi's wonderful memoir "The Periodic Table," I can almost guarantee you'll fall in love with "Uncle Tungsten."

I will admit that I am not a science buff, but I thought this book was intriguing. The stories are thought provoking and surprising. From the surgeon with Tourette's to the artist who loses sense of color to the blind man who gains sight only to hate it, you will be enthralled. I did not want the book to end, and it is non-fiction!

I first bumped into this book in my college English class as part of the required reading. The first story, which is the story from which the book derives its title, is about a music teacher who got so good at looking at the details, his brain could no longer focus on the large picture.

Each story is about Oliver Sacks' interactions with different people who have there own neurological disorders. I enjoyed every story and enjoyed Oliver Sacks and his attempts to help each individual, whether he was successful or not.

This is just a great book.

Halliwell chooses five important thinkers among many who fit his definition of "romantic scientists," a useful concept and category harking back to Goethe. Halliwell does an immense project, comparing and contrasting the very substantial contributions of William James, Otto Rank, Ludwig Binswanger, Erik Erikson, and Oliver Sacks. Scholars in psychology and related fields owe him a great debt of gratitude, and the work is written so well that non-specialists can enjoy it.
I have reviewed this at length in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine (2002: vol. 76: 846-847).

This book has helped me in so many ways to understand the human mind. I can't say enough about this book, except to tell people to buy it.

This book was assigned text for a neuropsych. class I had during my undergraduate degree. It was by far the best text I've had assigned in any class. This book, along with Ramachandran's, Phantom's in the Brain, was the first time I even considered the Nature side of the Nature/Nurture debate. I will never forget the stories. Learning about these cases with brain disorders left me with such a sense of awe for what the brain can do. Sacks has a wonderful writing style that turns philosophical at the end of each story, so you are left with a lot of food for thought. It is also a great exercise to follow his choices at each step and weight it against what you may have done.

This book is full of tales of interesting anomalies in the brain. Oliver Sacks tells each story in a way that conveys his passion for the topic. Very enjoyable reading for those interested in the mysteries of the human mind.

This book was required for a cluster class I took. I am keeping the book even though I dropped the class because it has wonderful and interesting viewpoints of others who have to cope with life different than most of us. I would recommend this to a friend.

Be thankful after reading this book,
Be thankful you do not have one of these very interesting yet severe neuropsychological illnesses.

a great book, very interesting, it teaches you a lot about the human body and mind, and as someone famous once said, it shows you how "whatever can go wrong, will go wrong".

I would not miss it!

This books presents detailed and well documented transcripts of clinical trials in the areas of neuroscience/ology. A few interesting experiments involved subduing a patients phantom limb pain, in this case the sensations of their own fingers clawing into their palm, by constructing a simple box paneled with mirrors that would provide the visual of having two hands to a hand amputee patient. Another case is in plasticity where the rubbing certain areas of a patients face with a Q-tip invoked sensations of the Q-tip rubbing along the now amputated hand. This is also the first book I have read that had so many interesting and insightful footnotes.

Reading this book gives one a foundation on which to build the complete picture. Yes, the book is not giving the reader the complete picture. But it does provide the foundation. Now what the reader needs to do is study the books on the Buddhist teachings of emptiness by Guy Newland or Jeffrey Hopkins. After having done this, now one is able to connect the dots, build the complete picture. What is very odd is how authors of this discipline, with all their studies, with all their research, have not yet arrived at this juncture. Hmmmm....it truly makes one wonder.

If you're reading this review, then you're wasting your time by not reading the book. A friend gave me his copy of the book and I literally could not put the book down. Later, I decided that I wanted a copy for myself.

The book is extremely well written; not only Ramachandran is one of the leading scientists, he also possesses an affinity for writing. It even gets better, you will be delighted by his sense of humor which adds to the joy of reading.

The most important aspect of the book is of course the science content. While one or two sections might seem a bit technical (I am fairly certain anyone can handle those sections), the science in general is well explained and is highly awe spiring. I will never forget my excitement and sense of wonder while I was reading through this book. If you want to have an idea of how we see, how we think, how our brains operate then this book is highly recommended.

I am a long-time admirer of Dr Ramachandran's work (and Sandra Blakeslee's writings).

Dr Ramachandran's work is frequently references in literature about neuroscience.

I found the book first in Islamabad, where it had been published in New Delhi and sold for P Rupess 295. The illustrations in that edition were slightly smudged.

I ordered it from the United States hoping that the illustrations would be clearer. However, in this paper back edition, they are not that much clearer than in the Indian edition.

The wonderful content is the same, of course. Perhaps a hard back edition would have better reproduction of the illustrations.

Guy B. Scandlen

While this book may not be for everyone, I believe that most people will have a hard time putting it down. Ramachandran's ability to explain absurdly complicated concepts with simple language and simple methods is just one of the facets of his genius. After readking Phantoms I burned through at least 4 other books he wrote, but still Phantoms is by far the best.