Further Reading
CRITICISM
Anderson, Brom. “Two Healers.” Yale Review 77, no. 2 (March 1988): 172-82.
Labels the case histories of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat “dramas of identity.”
Anker, Roy. “Finding Life in the Movies.” Cresset 55, no. 7 (May 1992): 27-30.
Contrasts Awakenings with its cinematic adaptation.
Budge, Alice, and Emil Dickstein. “The Doctor as Patient: Bioethical Dilemmas Reflected in Literary Narratives.” Literature and Medicine 7 (1988): 132-37.
Examines the depiction of doctor-patient relationships in A Leg to Stand On.
Diedrich, Lisa. “Breaking down: A Phenomenology of Disability.” Literature and Medicine 20, no. 2 (fall 2001): 209-30.
Examination of the philosophical meaning of disability, discussed through several case histories, one of them involving Sacks himself.
Herbert, Wray. “The Neuronal Zone.” Psychology Today 20, no. 2 (February 1986): 80.
Reviews The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, noting that Sacks's case studies are “really more like fables, tragic and extraordinary excursions into alternative realities.”
Kauffmann, Stanley. “Wastelands.” New Republic 204, no. 1-2 (7 January 1991): 32-3.
Compares the film adaptation of Awakenings to Harold Pinter's play A Kind of Alaska.
Klawans, Harold L. Review of Awakenings, by Oliver Sacks. JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association 260, no. 2 (8 July 1988): 273-74.
Regards Awakenings as a classic text.
Kusnetz, Ella. “The Soul of Oliver Sacks.” Massachusetts Review 33, no. 2 (summer 1992): 175-98.
Traces Sacks's understanding of the doctor-patient relationship as portrayed in his books.
Major, William. “Oliver Sacks, The Embodied Mind, and the Value of Desire.” Arizona Quarterly 55, no. 3 (autumn 1999): 83-106.
Investigates the relationship between A Leg to Stand On and The Embodied Mind, written by Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch.
Perlmutter, David M. “The Language of the Deaf.” New York Review of Books 38, no. 6 (28 March 1991): 65-72.
Asserts that “in Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf, the neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks takes us on a personal journey from the pathological to the linguistic-cultural view of deafness.”
Phillips, Barbara D. “TV: Oliver Sacks and Usher's Syndrome.” Wall Street Journal (24 August 1998): A10.
Favorable assessment of Sacks's television documentary Oliver Sacks: The Mind Traveller.
Pitts, Mary Ellen. “Reflective Scientists and the Critique of Mechanistic Metaphor.” In The Literature of Science: Perspectives on Popular Scientific Writing, edited by Murdo William McRae, pp. 249-72. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1993.
Explores the approach of Loren Eiseley, Fritjof Capra, Oliver Sacks, and V. V. Nalimov to the role of the individual in relation to science.
Additional coverage of Sacks's life and career is contained in the following sources published by Thomson Gale: Contemporary Authors, Vols. 53-56; Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vols. 28, 50, 76; Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vol. 67; Contemporary Popular Writers; DISCovering Authors 3.0; Literature Resource Center; and Major 20th-Century Writers, Eds. 1, 2.
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