The Mind’s Eye is a collection of essays — some of which have already appeared in The New Yorker — but it has a remarkably graceful coherence of theme, tone and approach. Once again, Sacks explores our shared condition through a series of vivid characters ... Given to...un-self-consciously generous gestures, Sacks would seem to be the ideal doctor: observant but accepting, thorough but tender, training his full attention on one patient at a time. For the patient’s benefit and for ours, he illuminates every uncanny detail, brings out every excruciating irony ... The sufferers who write to Sacks receive a deeply empathetic response ... he is most engaged by the process of compensation, how people make up for what they have lost, wresting new possibilities from their newly imposed limits ... So rewarding are the compensations of Sacks’ patients, in fact, that we begin to feel as if the tragedies that befell them were not tragedies at all, but — as the self-help books say — opportunities for growth.
Oliver Sacks is a perfect antidote to the anaesthetic of familiarity. His writing turns brains and minds transparent ... The Mind's Eye, his 11th book, takes vision and visual imagination as the overarching theme, mixing case stories, essays and memoir ... there's much to admire. But I confess there were times when my fingers were racing my eyes in a footnote-stumbling scramble to get through to the end of certain chapters. The case histories were the problem. I found some of them overstuffed, both with detail and moral sentiment. There's only so much compassion a man can take, only so much astonishment at human resilience. I began to yearn for a shift of register, for failure and despair, for a patient who disappoints or defeats Dr Sacks. But no, there is never anything, ultimately, but uplift ... The Mind's Eye would have been a disappointment had it looked no further for clinical material. But there's a redeeming fifth case: Oliver Sacks. And when the author steps into the clinical spotlight the book comes to life.
Sacks's stories are drawn from case histories, textbooks and sympathetically observed encounters with patients ... But the substance of the book soon turns on Sacks himself and the extraordinary impact on his own perception of the world once he discovers that he has ocular melanoma ... The Mind's Eye is an eye-opener. Sacks's patients recognise what is happening to them, and find ways to cope ... His stories deliver both clinical understanding and a serving of hope. The victories are small, but they are victories all the same. More profoundly, such stories remind us that our brains are all we have.
Seated on the wrong side of the consultant’s desk, pinned to the page by the business end of his own pen, Sacks finds himself describing his own fear. An old man now, he has come to inhabit a story he cannot shape, and dare not conclude. His partial loss of sight, his growing infirmity, and his increasing reliance on his friends, are aspects of a life that is not going to end happily, because lives never do. It is a measure of his artistry that Sacks slots such funk and anxiety into a book that’s mostly about the plasticity and adaptability of the human brain; a book that busily celebrates the indomitability of people who assemble meaningful, enjoyable lives around strokes, blindings, and other more exotic losses ... The Mind’s Eye is about the possibility of recovery and the inexorable decline of the ageing individual. From this collision of incompatible truths, tragedy is made ... But...there’s no denying it works, making The Mind’s Eye Sacks’s most powerful book to date.
Sacks’s own adventure at the edges of seeing – the cancer itself proved curable, but his vision was permanently impaired – forms the core of The Mind’s Eye. It is a reflection, in seven essays, on the optical effects of certain neurological disasters and on the response of the brain to partial or complete blindness ... Sacks tells these stories with his customary sympathy and acuity ... But while there is a wealth of medical detail in these anecdotes, when compared to the vivid portraits of his predecessors, there is something oddly flat about Sacks’s writing in this latest compendium. The neurological portraits never truly grip or engage in the way the account of his own illness does, with its unconsoling and ambiguous outcome. There might be a non-literary reason for this: Sacks himself, he tells us, suffers from a lifelong inability to recall or recognise faces and is even known to blank friends, colleagues and family members. Perhaps he just doesn’t recall the texture of a consultation or encounter with the precision one might hope. Or maybe – because The Mind’s Eye is none the less deeply interesting – the topic simply deserves a more sustained and richer treatment.
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.
Oliver Sacks is our greatest chronicler of people with unusual neurological and sensory disabilities and experiences, and the remarkable adaptations they people have made. Now, sadly, we learn that Sacks has begun to go blind due to eye cancer. The Mind's Eye includes his brilliant, poignant observations of this process, his terror and grief, culminating in his awe-inspiring, resilient use of that blindness to begin to better 'dissect" out the mind's eye, now that his is no longer pounded by visual input from without ... This is a deeply moving book, and one can only imagine the duress under which it was written, and yet, as it rises to the concluding essay, The Mind's Eye, one begins to forget that duress as Sacks outlines the surprising range of neuroplastic reorganizations that occur in blindness.
As in previous books, Sacks is more observer than doctor, using these individual cases as a jumping-off point for his reflections. This leads to an uncomfortable thought: The stories of these afflictions are compelling, but is Sacks just presenting a highbrow freak show for our entertainment? ... After the second case study, however, it becomes clear the focus of these stories is not the patients’ ailments, but their remarkable ability to compensate for their cognitive and perceptive deficits ... Sacks’ emphasis on compensation and adaptation becomes even more poignant when we are introduced to his final case study: himself ... Sacks’ portrayal of himself as a patient serves to humanize him, almost too much.
Again and again, Sacks invites readers to imagine their way into minds unlike their own, encouraging a radical form of empathy ... And yet, Sacks’ repeated insistence in this book on the inability of one person to imagine the perceptions of another seems to throw his project into question. If we cannot imagine our way into the minds of people radically different from ourselves, then what is the point of all these elaborate and gorgeously detailed case studies in The Mind’s Eye? What is the point of literature? ... The Mind’s Eye expresses a stubborn hope that rests on language, 'that most human invention,' which Sacks says 'can enable what, in principle, should not be possible. It can allow all of us, even the congenitally blind, to see with another person’s eyes.'
In measured prose with a blessed lack of jargon, Sacks explores the ingenuity with which individuals cope with bizarre neurological conditions ... Sacks writes a frightening, funny diary (reminiscent of Woody Allen) about a melanoma found in his eye. Humane, empathic, he is the doctor you would want.
...this new work explores the dysfunctions of the brain through selected patient case histories, compellingly presented as poignant, inspiring and absorbing stories ... Sacks’ blended use of story, anecdote and reference to explore fundamental and mysteriously interconnected complexities of human sight, perception and experience works to great effect. But what makes The Mind’s Eye stand tall is his recounting of how humans—and the human brain—can adapt, finding creative and ingenious ways to cope with physical losses and disorders. The final essay on perception, which discusses blindness, visual imagery and memory, direct visual experience and the paradox of the power of language, is breathtaking. From first phrase to final sentence, Dr. Sacks will draw you into a fascinating mental landscape that will leave you in awe of its strange, often spiritual and exquisite pathways.
Looking at the experiences of extraordinarily accomplished blind people is typical of Sacks, who focuses his attention, here and in other books, not only on pathology, but on the miraculous accommodations that some people are able to make with dimming prospects and painful losses. Indeed, these stories themselves, and his recounting of them in this book, begin to seem like Sacks' own attempt, using the tools he knows best, to cancel out his pain and apprehension ... Of course, not every form of compensation is equally inspiring, and not every subtracted faculty is replaced with some new inner radiance ... If anything, [Sacks'] eloquent accounts of his patients' struggles with illness, and of his own medical problems, can reawaken, at least temporarily, an appreciation of how fortunate we are to move through this world with all, or at least most, of our faculties intact. If, later on, we find ourselves once again shuffling numbly through our secret miseries, we can only be helped by remembering, as books like The Mind's Eye illuminate for us, that there are few human failings worse than taking for granted life and its manifold hidden miracles.
Sacks...once again uses the experiences shared with him by patients and others to probe 'the complex workings of the brain and its astounding ability to adapt and overcome disability.' ... As usual with Sacks, an absorbing attempt to unravel the complexities of the human mind.
...Sacks finds fascination in the strange workings of the human mind. Written with his trademark insight, compassion, and humor, these seven new tales once again make the obscure and arcane absolutely absorbing.
