Vintage Sacks
Page 17
Science/Literature/0-375-70073-0
Migraine
Migraine is Sacks’s classic meditation on the nature of health and malady, on the unity of mind and body. Here too is Sacks’s discovery of how migraine may show us, through hallucinatory displays, the elemental activity of the cerebral cortex—and, potentially, the self-organizing patterns of Nature itself.
Psychology/Literature/0-375-70406-X
Seeing Voices
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 its own unique visual language, an extraordinary mode of communication that tells us much about the basis of language in hearing people as well.
Psychology/Literature/0-375-70407-8
Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood
Oliver Sacks’s memoir of his childhood in London in the 1930s and ’40s, this is the story of a brilliant young mind springing to life. By turns elegiac and comic, Uncle Tungsten chronicles Sacks’s love affair with science and the magnificently odd and sometimes harrowing childhood in which that love affair unfolded.
Science/Memoir/0-375-70404-3
Oliver Sacks
VINTAGE SACKS
Oliver Sacks was born in 1933 in London, England, into a family of physicians and scientists, and earned his medical degree at Oxford. Since 1965, he has lived in New York, where he is a practicing neurologist.
In 1966 Dr. Sacks began working in a chronic care facility where he encountered an extraordinary group of patients, many of whom had spent decades in strange, frozen states, like human statues, unable to initiate movement. He recognized these patients as survivors of the great pandemic of sleeping sickness that had swept the world from 1916 to 1927, and treated them with a then-experimental drug, L-DOPA, which enabled them to come back to life. They became the subjects of his book Awakenings, which later inspired a play by Harold Pinter and the Oscar-nominated feature film with Robert De Niro and Robin Williams.
Sacks is the author of two collections of case histories from the far borderlands of neurological experience, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars, in which he describes patients struggling to live with conditions ranging from Tourette’s syndrome to autism, Parkinsonism, musical hallucination, phantom limb syndrome, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer’s disease. He has investigated the world of deaf people in Seeing Voices, and a rare community of colorblind people in The Island of the Colorblind. He has also written about his experiences as a doctor in Migraine and as a patient in A Leg to Stand On. His most recent books are Oaxaca Journal and the autobiographical Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood.
His work, which has been supported by the Guggenheim Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, regularly appears in The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, as well as various medical journals. The New York Times has referred to Dr. Sacks as “the poet laureate of medicine,” and in 2002 he was awarded the Lewis Thomas Prize by Rockefeller University, which recognizes the scientist as poet. He is an honorary fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Further information is available
at www.oliversacks.com
BOOKS BY OLIVER SACKS
Migraine
Awakenings
A Leg to Stand On
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf
An Anthropologist on Mars
The Island of the Colorblind
Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood
Oaxaca Journal
A VINTAGE ORIGINAL, JANUARY 2004
Copyright © 2004 by Oliver Sacks, M.D.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by
Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
“Uncle Tungsten” and “Stinks and Bangs” were originally published in
Uncle Tungsten © 2001 by Oliver Sacks (Alfred A. Knopf ). “Rose R.” was originally
published in Awakenings copyright © 1973, copyright renewed 2001 by Oliver Sacks,
and “Foreword to the 1990 edition” was published in the 1990 edition of Awakenings
copyright © 1990 by Oliver Sacks. “A Deaf World” was originally published in slightly
different form in Seeing Voices, copyright © 1989 by Oliver Sacks (Vintage Books, 2000).
“A Surgeon’s Life” from An Anthropologist on Mars copyright © 1995 by Oliver Sacks
(Alfred A. Knopf ). “The Visions of Hildegard” was originally published in Migraine
copyright © 1971, 1992, copyright renewed 1999 by Oliver Sacks (Vintage Books,
1999). “Pingelap” and extracts from “Island Hopping” were originally published in
slightly different form in The Island of the Colorblind, copyright © 1996 by
Oliver Sacks (Alfred A. Knopf ).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sacks, Oliver W.
Vintage Sacks/Oliver Sacks.
1st Vintage Books ed.
p. cm.
1. Neurology—Popular works. 2. Neuroscience—Popular works.
RC351.S1953 2004
616.8—dc22
2003057557
www.vintagebooks.com
www.randomhouse.com
eISBN: 978-0-307-43005-2
v3.0