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Books : Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
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Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain by: Oliver Sacks List Price: £17.99 Childrens Toy Shop Price: £10.79 You Save: £7.20 (40%)Prices subject to change. |
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Binding: Hardcover EAN: 9780330418379 ISBN: 0330418378 Label: Picador Manufacturer: Picador Number Of Pages: 400 Publication Date: November 02, 2007 Publisher: Picador Studio: Picador Sales Rank: 3084 Related Items:
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Customer Reviews
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 Rating:  - Minds making musicBy now, it's a given that an Oliver Sacks' book is worth your time and close attention. His particular talent lies in making the science interesting without becoming a "pop-science" writer. This is not an easy achievement, but Sacks manages it with facility. He can explain the science in terms of case studies - many of which have claimed his medical attention. He does this while mixing in experiences of his own and some personal reflections which are anything but intrusions. While some of his books are essays on selected individuals ["An Anthropologist on Mars" is an example], this one has a very special focus: the minds that make music unbidden. Music arising in the mind without prompting may seem a common enough occurence. The ... Read More: Rating:  - DisappointingI am usually a fan of Oliver Sacks but this is a disappointing book. I am about halfway through and on the verge of putting it down, although will perservere as it's a fast read (ie. lightweight and not amazingly thought-provoking). It just reads, as someone else said, more like a series of magazine articles, with each chapter ("article") simply being a list of half a dozen or so interesting cases, but without much analysis of the whys and wherefores. Lightweight, unsatisfying and not up to his usual standards. Pass. Rating:  - A little clunkyI got quite excited when I read articles about this book. It has not really lived up to my expectations. It tells you about people who hear music in their heads, people with perfect pitch who lose it and vice versa, people with tinnitus and so on. The trouble for me was that in the end it becomes just a big long list of notes on the patients Sachs has treated. I could have used a bit more context, or even philosophical speculation and wonder. But the author is a medical man so he confines himself pretty much to the facts. And he reams them out - the patient experienced this, the patient reacted like that.... Its fascinating material but in all honesty the book is not well written. It is more academic than I had expected. ... Read More: Rating: - Disappointing introspectionWhile I have been a fan of Oliver Sacks, I am beginning to realise that a lot of his books seem to be constructed so that they can be easily divided into magazine articles (or they at least appear that way). I have read the first few chapters of Musicophilia only so far and to be totally honest, as a musician with training in the neurosciences, I found it interesting as a subject. However, the book is not well written. It has long segments of rather egocentric introspection and navel gazing. I wish it would focus more on the case studies and have a much more consistent approach to the subject. It is convoluted in parts and much of it seems to lose it's thread and drift into talking about other things, especially at the end of chapters. While Oliver ... Read More: Rating: - A Music-Loving Neurologist Tells Us About Extreme Forms of Musical InteractionMusicophilia made me realize how others perceive music. It was a shock. I assumed that everyone experienced music the same way. Wrong! Do you ever ask anyone what happens when they hear music? I didn't before I read this book. Now I plan to ask everyone. Dr. Sacks has the kind of fine writing style and awareness of music that makes his tales seem as appealing as the cases that Dr. Sigmund Freud wrote about. As Dr. Sacks pointed out, Dr. Freud didn't care for music so that gentleman failed to investigate and report on many of the phenomena in this book. We don't exactly know why the mind and body interact with music in the ways that they do. Part is undoubtedly heredity. Part is undoubtedly due to exposure to musical ... Read More: |
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