Austin Scott Collins

This boo

This book is both fascinating and an absolute delight to read, because Dr. Sacks was educated in Britain in the 1950s and then lived and worked in the United States in the 1960s. The tone of his writing is simultaneously lyrical yet intellectually rigorous, filled with citations and notes, poetically evocative while academically strict and precise.

I was struck by what I can only call a certain unwarranted humility to his style—it would have been easy for him to say (or imply), "I, as one of the most well-known physicians in this field," but instead he describes patients and symptoms and his own personal experiences with a simple and direct approach. He does not hold back in discussing his own history of drug use, and he is not reluctant to talk about the positive and uplifting aspects as well as the dark and troubling outcomes. His voice is the voice of a scientist, the voice of a curious mind seeking the truth.

Overall, my favorite part of Hallucinations is the way Dr. Sacks explains the fine but important clinical distinctions between different types of non-real sensory inputs, and their profoundly different ranges of organic, pathological, and pharmacological causes. This book is an extraordinary journey through the nature of the mind and consciousness, never more clearly on display than when some critical functionality is malfunctioning or tricked into misbehavior.