"A Leg to Stand On" by Oliver Sacks [ ISBN 0-684-85395-7]
Disappointing and long winded.
Doctor Oliver Sacks is well known for his informative and fascination explorations of the profoundly odd ways the human brain can go wrong and the stories of the people so afflicted. "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" and "An Anthropologist on Mars" are interesting and worth the time to read because of the insight they give into the little understood field of neurology. Unfortunately when Dr. Sacks tries to tell the story of his own injury, he totally fails to bring much expertise or insight to the story.
Dr. Sacks tears a tendon in his leg while hiking alone in the mountains of Norway and the book is, ostensibly, the story of his lone decent from the mountain and his subsequent treatment. I expected a narrative about the treatment and recovery from a serious injury told from the point of view of an experienced physician. Sadly Dr. Sacks brings no special insight to the situation and merely recounts his concerns and impressions during this process. You might think his training and knowledge would allay most fears after he is delivered to the hospital but they only seem to get worse.
The descriptions and narrative lack focus or discernible direction. In the "Acknowledgments" section he thanks his editors (six of them) for dealing with the original manuscript of 300,000 words. With six editors cutting and pasting from a bushel of manuscript, it is no surprise the final work seems to have been written by a committee because it WAS.
The section dealing with Sacks' decent from the mountain has a few good moments but the rest could have easily been reduced to a chapter in one of his other books. I think this book was a bit of indulgence on the part of a publisher towards an author that has done well in the past.
JGD
| - Home - | - Contact - | - Web Sites - | - MS Info - | - Book Reviews - | - Curiosities - |