The Man Who spent 26 weeks on the New York Times Bestsellers List in 1986, and the paperback edition remained a top seller into March of 1987. “The scientific and the romantic in such realms cry out to come together… They come together at the intersection of fact and fable, the intersection which characterises (as it did in my book Awakenings) the lives of the patients here narrated.” “I feel compelled to speak of tales and fables as well as cases,” Sacks writes in the preface. Inspired by the great 19th-century medical writers, Sacks made it a goal to “restore the human subject” as the center of neurological case histories. Essays in the volume have gone on to inspire plays, rock albums, television specials, and even an opera. Each of these “strange tales” centers on the story of an individual patient living with a peculiar and challenging neurological condition. Organized into four parts, the book is comprised of 24 short essays that survey a broad and complex range of neurological disorders, from agnosia, aphasia, and Korsakoff’s syndrome to epilepsy, Tourette’s, and autism. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is by most counts Oliver Sacks’ best-known work. His next two books were released within a year of one another: A Leg to Stand On in 1984, and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat in 1985. After the explosive release of Awakenings in 1973, Oliver Sacks waited over a decade to publish a second book.
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