Wednesday, May 14, 2014

Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks


The latest book by Oliver Sacks. This time he presents several case studies (or more like anecdotes) about different sorts of hallucinations - visual, auditory and even some other forms of that intriguing phenomenon. However, he is recycling his anecdotes by now, and the book isn’t anywhere as interesting as some of his earlier works - even though many of the stories _are_ familiar from the earlier books. The stories also tend to repeat themselves, there several very similar ones. Many of them weren’t really unusual – at least not for a neurologist. Almost every page has a foot note, which makes reading less smooth it might be. There were some surprising revelations: apparently Oliver Sachs was pretty heavily into the drugs in the sixties, taking about everything he could get in his hands, up to and including antiparkinson medications at extremely high doses. Well, _that_ caused some pretty unusual and very realistic hallucinations… As a whole the book was readable, but probably I will resist the temptation and won’t buy his possible next book: the law of diminishing returns seems to work.

320 pp.

No comments: