In his most extraordinary audiobook, "one of the great clinical writers
of the twentieth century" (The New York Times) recounts the case
histories of patients lost in the bizarre, apparently inescapable world
of neurological disorders. Oliver Sacks's 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; patients no
longer able to recognize people and common objects; patients stricken
with violent tics and grimaces or who shout involuntary obscenities;
patients whose limbs have become alien; patients 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's
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."
