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|  | Author: Oliver Sacks
Publisher: Vintage
List Price: $14.95
Buy Used: $5.99
as of 11/22/2009 20:27 CST details
You Save: $8.96 (60%)
New (60) Used (35) from $5.99
Seller: braybookscds
Rating:  115 reviews
Sales Rank: 2216
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Paperback
Edition: Revised & enlarged
Pages: 448
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.1 x 1.2
ISBN: 1400033535
Dewey Decimal Number: 781
EAN: 9781400033539
ASIN: 1400033535
Publication Date: September 23, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Very little wear. No stamps or marks.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 16-20 of 115
Fast read, intriguing stories April 9, 2009
T. Young (Danville, KY USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I really enjoyed reading this book. At first I was not looking forward to it as it seems technical and very thick. However, with lots of little chapters, not only did the book read very quickly, but very few times was it bogged down with technical talk of parts of the brain etc. I'd recommend it to anyone interested in reading about what music can do to the human brain.
 Musicophilia March 25, 2009
R. Bob
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Fascinating book on the power of music to disturb, inspire, or restore the mind. As always, Oliver Saks relates the story through personal stories of his patients as well as some of his own experiences with music. There are quite a few footnotes in the book, making this a somewhat more scholarly than average read.
 Good for the musically-impaired March 23, 2009
Gideon October (Kensington, Maryland United States)
14 out of 19 found this review helpful
Oliver Sacks is an intelligent man. His understanding of psychology and appreciation for music are unquestionable. The case studies of various music-brain disorders and phenomenon are fairly interesting.
The principle problem with this text is the author's clear lack of musical understanding, historically and personally.
Most Musicians will find the following statement from the text frustrating:
"music is wholly abstract, it has no formal power of representation whatever. We may go to a play to learn about jealousy, betrayal, vengeance, love - but music , instrumental music, can tell us nothing about these."
As a professional musician, I completely disagree. Sacks drives this point home several times. Finally I got tired of reading his un-musical opinions and realized he was an outsider desperately trying to understand music from a silly intellectual point of view. Maybe similar non-musically inclined people will enjoy speculating on why music is so powerful and continue to distance themselves from it through a academic bubble of elitism.
Music is not abstract! It has real historic reasons for being the way it is. Sacks is not a music historian so he prefers to treat it like a funny byproduct of evolution...sort of an accident of biology. Sort of a backwards way of talking about something so important and central to human experience.
I've had students who think like Sacks. They come to music with an intellectual perspective and think they can reason their way through it. Of course, this is not really why music exists, nor is it really why they like studying music. For all of his psychological understanding, Sacks remains unaware of why he actually enjoys the thing he wrote an entire book about.
Music and life February 13, 2009
William H. DuBay (Costa Mesa, CA United States)
Oliver Sacks did not embark on a definitive description of how the brain handles music. Instead, he set out to describe the musical anomalies that reviewer Pletko enumerates above, such as amusia, synesthesia and musicians' dystonia.
Sacks only mentions possible causes, such as the ability of the language functions of the left brain to inhibit and drown out the musical abilities of the right brain. He also mentions the special ability of music to encode large sequences of information. In other places, he mentions the musical rhythms of the body that coordinate extraordinarily complex functions like walking and running. How the body uses music is the subject of another book yet to be written.
Do we find music pleasing because it is the multi-dimensional language of the body?
A fascinating journey into new musical dimensions February 13, 2009
Michael Tiemann (Chapel Hill, NC United States)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I have become increasingly interested in music as I get older, feeling and believing that music has much greater importance to a well-functioning mind than as mere commercial or entertainment salve. Who better to help explore that theory than Oliver Sachs?
Sachs is a great writer, and blessed with particularly interesting stories and experiences. He is obviously fluent in terms and references of musical appreciation.
My only complaint, and others may think it a feature, is that the book seemed to try to be both a collection of really interesting stories (stories good enough to be retold) and a compendium of medically interesting stories (which seem to be more scientifically interesting but less compelling as stories).
I'm glad that Sachs chose this as a subject, and delighted to have read the book.
Showing reviews 16-20 of 115
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