MixedThe Sunday Times (UK)These are intriguing tales, if slightly well worn (Sacks first described the symptoms afflicting Kallir 25 years ago), and are interwoven with some fascinating discussions of evolution and the mind ... But you can’t shake off the sense that something else is afoot here — Sacks himself, 76 years old, is in a melancholy, valedictory mood ... The explanation for this air of glum introspection arrives, with a crunching shift of gears, two-thirds of the way into the book ... Then, after 60 compelling pages, the book hastily reverts to a long, stodgy, clinical discussion of sight in the brain and ends with no further reference to Sacks’s plight. It is both jarring, and frustrating...This dull concluding chapter cements the final, unsatisfying impression left by The Mind’s Eye — a warm and smart but inconsistent, illfitting work that begins as a gentle farewell tour of the neurological world, flares to life as an entirely different, gripping book, and then falls quite flat.
