An anthropologist on Mars

Considered one of the great clinical writers of the century, Oliver Sacks presents in his latest book seven neurological cases that constitute a profound reflection on the essence of identity and the mechanisms of knowledge. A painter who, after a car accident, no longer see the color; a surgeon whose continuous tics and compulsions forwards only when opera or pilots his airplane; a man who, after a lifetime of blindness, recovers sight only to be realize that you can't see; an autistic teacher able to just try and understand the complexity of human emotions to animals, and who left so perplexed that he feels like "an anthropologist on Mars": these are some of these paradoxical «stories» presenting us an aspect of existence that would be impossible to know without that anomaly known as disease. For Sacks, which somehow also shares this status as an anthropologist on Mars, it is not so much about what disease a person has, but how the person is trapped in disease and subject to its laws, and how everything what constitutes identity suffers a process of adaptation to allow him to inhabit that altered physical space which is the body. The thesis that keeps the author is that it is not so much "cured" disease, because some of that here appear, such as Autism, Tourette Syndrome, achromatopsia, do not support the concept of healing, but learn to live with it, despite the grotesque that may be some of the symptoms of what is different that the patient can feel respect to so called normal. All of these patients are on doctor Sacks not only a doctor attentive, intuitive and insightful, but someone who shared their lives and the method empathic research presented by G. K. Chesterton through his most famous character, Father Brown. These seven parables about the mutability of the human condition, Oliver Sacks demonstrates again his exceptional talent as a storyteller, his vast culture and their ability to make these characters at first sight outlandish end up looking like us family and normal.