Word: essays
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...most illustrative essay in Anthropologist, Sacks introduces Temple Grandin, who in her childhood was found to have Asperger's syndrome, a high-function form of autism. Grandin now holds a Ph.D. in animal science and a teaching post at Colorado State University. She is well known not only on the medical-conference circuit for her insights into Asperger's but also in the meat-packing business for her advice on the humane treatment and disposal of livestock. Among her contributions is a design for a curved slaughterhouse ramp that is said to reduce animal anxiety by keeping hidden the high...
With Grandin and other subjects, Sacks has refined the case history into an art form. As his friend and colleague New York City neuropsychologist Elkhonon Goldberg puts it, "Oliver has salvaged the uniqueness of patients from statistical averaging." Indeed, each essay seems like an extended house call from an old-fashioned family doctor. There is also Sacks' open, encompassing style that welcomes the reader into his esoteric world. "A neurologist's life is not systematic," he writes, "but it provides him with novel and unexpected situations, which can be windows, peepholes, into the intricacy of nature-an intricacy that...
...aspects of individual subjectivity are objectified and transferred to the agent of power. Thus in extreme cold the activity of the subject-"freezing"-becomes a description of the weather itself. 3 This process, for which Pierce (1986) coined the problematic term "(me)teorology," is the central concern of this essay...
...admiring piece about Graham Greene and his commitment to understand every position and even sympathize with an enemy [Essay, Feb. 20], Pico Iyer reveals both the implications and the presuppositions of the modern relativist view. It is no surprise that placing mercy over justice would lead a man to uphold someone like Soviet double agent Kim Philby, an operative of the bloodiest dictatorship in history, and receive no moral condemnation for it. What may not be obvious, though, is how the lack of moral integrity today stems from an intellectual failure, the epistemological humility that refuses to hold anything...
...turning this essay into a play. But the adapter is having predictable problems. "I can write about her," he says. "That's perfectly straightforward. But I have to find a story that I can tell about myself. And revealing things about yourself is so difficult." It's an easy trick for the typical contemporary author; every sentence is an advertisement for himself. But Bennett is discreet-which these days amounts to literary heroism...