Author Spotlight: Oliver Sacks

For those of you who have never heard of Oliver Sacks (1933-2015), he blew into the literary scene in 1985 with his now classic and epically popular, 'The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat'. A neurologist by training (dealing with all types of disorders of the nervous system), his turn of phrase and often humorous take on science has made his books bestsellers around the world.

Now I can hear you saying, 'But I really only read ficition...' or 'I know nothing about science, I don't think I'd understand...'. But what was is amazing and very endearing of Sacks' works is that neither of those things matter. His books are series of connected short stories about people first and foremost. Their lives, their loves and how they cope with whatever their nervous system has thrown at them. As a trained musician, his Musicophilia, which deals exclusively with the intersecting of music and the brain, is fascinating! But all of his books that I have read so far have made laugh, made me feel empathy for the people in each story and come out the end feeling like I learnt something new about how the brain works.

List of Works:

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

Seeing Voices

An Anthropologist on Mars

The Island of the Colourblind

Musicophilia

The Mind's Eye

Hallucinations

Autobiographical works:

Uncle Tungsten

On the Move