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| Book critic and professor Alan Jacobs discusses a collection of clinical tales written by neurologist Oliver Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars. Dr. Sacks is committed to telling stories about his patients, many of whom are afflicted with bizarre neurological disorders. However, his book is written about people, not just diseases, with a belief that the medical establishment inadequately treats illness because it has turned itself into a kind of machine which lacks a sense of aesthetics and a sense of human sympathy. In an effort to explain what it was really like to experience the kinds of terrible neurological deficits of his patients, he began to write in a way that more and more resembled the work of a novelist than the work of a scientist. From this new perspective he realized that many of these afflictions or deficits are, in fact, blessings to these people. |
An Anthropoligist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales (Alfred A. Knopf, 1995) |
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Alan Jacobs has contributed to multiple editions of the Journal; click here for his record.
 Alan Jacobs has also been featured on the MARS HILL AUDIO Conversations "Decadent Immortals: Alan Jacobs on Anne Rice" and "The Public Poetry of W. H. Auden." Short descriptions of these Conversations are listed here. In addition, MARS HILL AUDIO has recorded Jacobs's A Visit to Vanity Fair: Moral Essays on the Present Age. A description of the book is available here. A chapter about C. S. Lewis from Jacobs's A Visit to Vanity Fair is published on the MARS HILL AUDIO Anthology, The Christian Mind of C. S. Lewis. For more information about it, click here. |
Sacks, Oliver
Authors
Stories
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