Book Club

I just finished reading the Oliver Sacks book "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat" and I wanted to recommned it to everyone. It's a collection of case histories of people who through different pathologies have found themselves without (or with excessess) of different traits of consciousness or of the human mental experience. Sacks has observed these people in both clinical and natural settings and this more humanistic approach allows him to ponder on what makes up the human identity. The amazing thing about the cases he writes about is that above all, even in the most tragic of situations (mental retardation, autism, anterograde amnesia), the will to have personal internal lives usually wins out... Oh, and these cases also make you think all other types of shit, about consciousness and music and old age and thinking and stuff. So I recommend it. He's a good writer and I should have read this a lond time ago.