In a fashion still more personal than his previous books, Oliver Sacks gives us portraits of several neurological patients, following them as far as possible into their otherworldly modes of being: a surgeon who is consumed by the compulsive tics of Tourette's syndrome unless he is operating; an artist who loses all sense of color in a car accident, but finds a new sensibillity and creative power in black and white; an autistic Ph.D. who cannot decipher the simplest social exhange between humans but has built a career out of her intuitive understanding of animal behavior. By taking a personal and intimate approach, Sacks reconstructs the innumerable mental acts we all take for granted and illuminates the way our brains construct our individual worth.
