Binding: Paperback
EAN: 9780330418386
ISBN: 0330418386
Label: Picador
Manufacturer: Picador
Number Of Pages: 425
Publication Date: October 03, 2008
Publisher: Picador
Studio: Picador

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Rating: - Musicophilia (2008) by Oliver Sacks
It has taken me nearly six weeks to wade through only the first third of this marathon of almost 400 pages. And the reason? I can only take Sacks' writing style, which is almost Victorian in nature, in small doses. Each time I pick up the book again, I wonder if the marker has been misplaced, since similar anecdotal stories seem to make up the entire literary content. It is a bit like reading later Aldous Huxley; a rambling series of musings, arbitrarily subdivided by chapter headings. In describing ... Read More

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Rating: - Interesting, yet disappointing in many ways
Oliver Sacks tells wonderful stories about how patients with severe brain dysfunctions manage to recover their faculties through new treatments of various kinds, and his previous books, notably Awakenings and The Man who Mistake His Wife for a Hat made Sacks famous for their revalatory and interesting nature.

This one, unfortunately, only goes part way to exploring the unusual appreciation that humans have for music, and goes too far in documenting cases of patients from the 1800s who lost ... Read More

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Rating: - Worth a read
This is a pretty good book, of interest to anyone who feels themselves somewhat musicophiliac and wants to know more about how music has the effect it does. Musicophilia isn't particularly focused and doesn't really go too deep into how music works on the brain, it's mostly just a string of case studies of people and conditions involving strange and intense relationships with music. It's well-written and accessible, and worth a read, though it doesn't attempt to give any major insights into why music is ... Read More

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