An anthropologist from mars by Oliver sacks and one who flew over the cuckoo's nest by Ken kessey

An Anthropologist from Mars

Thinking with another person's mind is the very goal that drives neurologist Oliver Sacks. An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales, Sacks' sixth book, gets its title from a comment made by the autistic engineer Temple Grand in while she tries to describe her futile attempts at cracking the "normal" social code. In the "seven paradoxical tales" related in An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales, Sacks attempts to see beyond the "disease" afflicting the neurological systems of his subjects, The scribe likes to find out the attractiveness in the minds of those who believe in modes most of us will not even fathom. Curled up with a Good Book Sacks departs behind the freezing, clinical outlook of the clinic and expends value time with his topics in their usual environments. He proceeds on journeys, takes vacations, actually gets to understand -- as well as he can -- the neurologically distinct persons about who he writes. He even takes the "Last Hippie," a man exposed of short-term recollection and chronologically stuck in the Sixties by a huge tumor, to a Grateful Dead concert. Sacks' empathy for the topics of his study, his yearn to realize the distinct neurological worlds they live, make for moving and humane writing.

The variety of minds, gifts and inward worlds Sacks examines is wide. He acquaints himself with a creative individual whose world is abruptly and evidently irreversibly rendered in shades of very dark and white after an auto misfortune in "The Case of the Colorblind Painter." He befriends a man with Toilette's syndrome in "A Surgeon's Life" whose vocation is as thriving as it is startling. In "To See and Not See," Sacks chronicles the down turn of a unseeing man's wellbeing and expectation next the procedure that devotes him view after a lifetime dwelled without vision, Another creative individual tints only pictures of his childhood dwelling obsessively with strongly sensed rendered, eerily photographic correctness, a dwelling he hasn't travelled to for 30 years, in "The Landscape of His Dreams." In "Prodigies," the scribe recounts an autistic young man whose spectacular artwork has been assembled in some books. And in "An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales," he expends a weekend in the enigmatic business of autistic scribe and technician Temple Grand in, a woman whose incompetence to fathom communal interaction between humans has a flip edge endowing her to seem an unbelievable empathy with animals. (Tapper, 190)

The two most going tales Sacks notifies are of the eternal hippie, forever-flower-child, and of the autistic juvenile creative individual from "Prodigies." It is in these two examples that Sacks appears to strive the hardest to make an emotional attachment, in both situations with persons who are as far from "normally" adept to conceive and maintain such attachments as possible. His yearn to traverse an unseen connection into inward worlds not likely for him to live, and his endeavors ...