A review by daredeviling
Hallucinations, by Oliver Sacks
2.0
I was entirely disappointed with this book, which is unfortunate because I've read Oliver Sacks before when I was in high school and I found him incredibly engaging. In Hallucinations, though, I didn't felt drawn into any of the clinical cases he discussed at all, and the neuroscience wasn't well explained, or rather, it wasn't well explained in a way where I felt like I wanted to know more or where I was intrigued. Mostly, I was just bored.
There were a couple good chapters I guess ("good" being kind of comparative to the rest of the book), which is why I didn't give this one star, but what I really didn't like about this book was the really long chapter dedicated to Dr. Sacks giving his autobiographical account of his own hallucinations while experimenting with all sorts of drugs when he was younger. He also talked about his own medical hallucinations, which was better, but I just felt like he spent way too much time on his time in the 70s doing drugs and how all that went. That whole bit could have definitely been shortened.
Overall, this book just described random hallucinations through pages and pages and then didn't give information about the causes in an engaging manner, which was unfortunate because as I said earlier, my experience with Dr. Sacks' previous literature has been great.
There were a couple good chapters I guess ("good" being kind of comparative to the rest of the book), which is why I didn't give this one star, but what I really didn't like about this book was the really long chapter dedicated to Dr. Sacks giving his autobiographical account of his own hallucinations while experimenting with all sorts of drugs when he was younger. He also talked about his own medical hallucinations, which was better, but I just felt like he spent way too much time on his time in the 70s doing drugs and how all that went. That whole bit could have definitely been shortened.
Overall, this book just described random hallucinations through pages and pages and then didn't give information about the causes in an engaging manner, which was unfortunate because as I said earlier, my experience with Dr. Sacks' previous literature has been great.