![]() ![]() Then his head began to be flooded with music that seemed to come, unstoppably, from nowhere. He bought recordings, acquired a piano and began to teach himself to play. Everything seemed normal until this fan of rock music was suddenly seized by a craving for classical piano music. ![]() Cicoria's heart apparently stopped, but he was resuscitated, and a few weeks later he was back at work. His new collection starts quite literally with a bolt from the blue, when a 42-year-old surgeon, Tony Cicoria, was struck by lightning in 1994. The result is a sort of reverse-engineering of the soul. But Sacks is adept at turning neurological narratives into humanly affecting stories, by showing how precariously our worlds are poised on a little biochemistry. The genre could have been an exploitative sideshow: a parade of misfits whose brains have been weirdly affected by disease, trauma, congenital defect or medical treatment. In his earlier collections of clinical tales - most famously in "Awakenings" (1973) and "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" (1985) - Sacks presented with compassion, sensitivity and learning what, in coarser hands, might have been freak shows of the mind. But there does seem to be no shortage of doctors who are musical and one of them is Oliver Sacks, a neurologist and author, who has now combined two of his passions in one book. Perhaps the concert was a medical benefit more likely, it never happened. ![]() ![]() Urban legend has it that when a patron fell ill in Carnegie Hall and the call went out for a doctor in the house, half the audience stood up to help. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |