Musicophilia

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Title: Musicophilia: Tales of Music and The Brain
Author: Oliver Sacks
Pages: 347
Genre: Nonfiction
Count for Year: 8

Sacks is probably most well-known for his book Awakenings, which was later made into a movie starring Robin Williams and Robert DeNiro. I can’t remember if I read that one or not, but in most of the books, I have read by Sacks, who is professor of Clinical Neurology and Psychiatry at Columbia University, he presents stories about people as they struggle to overcome some ailment they have. Often they do not overcome the ailment, but learn to live with it. Such are many of the cases here, from “a man who is struck by lightning and suddenly inspired to become a pianist at the age of 42,” to “a man whose memory spans seven seconds – for everything but music” (quotes from the back jacket).

Along the way, he touches on both the common, such as those earworms or brainworms we all experience (those pieces of music that get stuck in our brain) to the uncommon, such as musical hallucinations we experience. For the most part, the stories are, and were, fascinating journeys into how the brain works. My only complaint, although it be minor, is that sometimes he includes so much in his footnotes that it’s hard to keep up with everything (at least for this reader). It might have been better to include those footnotes in a notes section in the back, but that is a minor complaint in what is an otherwise very good book.

Final analysis: 8/10, because I take off a couple points for the footnote issue, for my waning interest toward the end and the fact that I’ve read other books by Sacks that I felt were better than this one. For example, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, which I enjoyed more than this one.

Others’ reviews of this book:

• A Striped Chair
• Bookwookey 1
  
• Bookwookey 2

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Tags: Books, brain, music, Nonfiction, Oliver Sacks, reviews