Journal Entry 1 by gypsysmom from Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada on Wednesday, December 29, 2010

I'm a big fan of Oliver Sacks. Knowing this my husband gave me his latest book for Christmas. I had read the review from the Globe and Mail to him when it was published a month or so ago and he remembered. I can hardly wait to read this. Note to self: When I'm done my brother-in-law wants to read it. 

Journal Entry 2 by gypsysmom at Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada on Saturday, January 14, 2012

All my life I have worried that I might go blind at some point in the future. I thought I only had to worry about something wrong with the eyes but now I find out, thanks to this book, that the brain can also be responsible for blindness and vision problems. So I'm not sure that I wanted to know this but as usual Oliver Sacks writes so superbly that I was caught up in his stories of patients and himself.

One of his patients is the Canadian mystery writer, Howard Engel. Howard woke up one morning, went to get his paper off the porch and could not read a word of it. To him it looked like someone had printed the Globe and Mail in a strange alphabet, like Cyrillic. He had suffered a stroke that caused alexia sine graphia or word blindness. Howard could not read but he could still write and eventually he managed to train himself to read. Howard has written about this phase of his life in the book The Man Who Forgot How to Read which my book club read a couple of years ago. But even though I was familiar with it I was interested to read Dr. Sacks' take on his story.

Sacks tells about other conditions such as prosopagnosia or face-blindness which Sacks suffers from himself. People with this condition cannot recognize even people who are very familiar to them. I had never heard of this condition until I read this book but in one of those strange coincidences that occur with reading The Globe and Mail had an article about it this week. The articles says that computerized training may help people who suffer from it. I've tucked a copy of the article into the back of the book.

Sacks also had a more serious condition caused by a malignancy on his optic nerve. He has almost completely lost his sight in one eye which means that he no longer has depth perception and he doesn't see things on the right side.

Dr. Sacks includes quite a bit of personal detail but he also delves into the scientific literature. He is a learned and articulate writer and I was again captivated by him.

I'll have to see if my brother-in-law still wants to read this. If not, then BellBelle might be interested.