Musicophilia

Critics

• Music of the hemispheres

  Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain by Oliver Sacks 367pp, Picador, £17.99 It is a remarkable fact that if I merely type "the Mission: Impossible theme tune" or "Beethoven's Fifth", you will probably start humming to yourself. We take it for g ... (read full critics)

  guardian.co.uk published on Sat, 25 Sep 2010

• The mystery of music

  To Charles Darwin, performing and enjoying music were two of humanity's most baffling attributes. 'Neither are of the least use to man,' he noted. And you can see what he means. We can spend hours a day listening to CDs or iPods, but the benefits are ... (read full critics)

  guardian.co.uk published on Fri, 24 Sep 2010

9 Reviews

• 

  Too long, clinical and redundant

  Sacks owes his popularity to his ability of telling cases of patients with spirit and kindness, crafting little stories out of each. What is important in every depiction is not much the details, as the overall truth and the perspective adopted.
  He Sacks has compiled a massive book (this is the upda ... (continue)

  Sacks owes his popularity to his ability of telling cases of patients with spirit and kindness, crafting little stories out of each. What is important in every depiction is not much the details, as the overall truth and the perspective adopted.
  He Sacks has compiled a massive book (this is the updated and expanded version) about case stories of people affected by neural disturbs that prevent them from a normal musical experience. This is admittedly one of his passion, and in principle an interesting topic for a book a la Sacks. But once you start reading, boredom comes quickly, the text does not flow, and such abundance of cases is just redundant, and there is little of the aforementioned qualities of Sacks' narration in action. So it overall ends up by annoying, when not speaking of trivial things (like people who ear music in their heads that they never heard: come on, every composer does it, it's just automatic when you start composing music, and I don't think composers are more sick than normal people!).
  Overall, quite boring and disappointing.

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  Mangoo said on Jun 12, 2010 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

• 

  Fascinating stories and insights into the human mind, music and creativity but scrappily assembled and with so many references to cases from Sacks' earlier works that the reader starts to doubt how much of this new book is really new.

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  huntch said on Jun 10, 2010 | Add your feedback

• 

  Very interesting

  This is a book about the music and its relationship with our brains: why sometimes a melody plays again an again into our minds till drive us near crazy? How does musical inspiration happens? It has some quite interesting stories about people that became more music aware and even music talented afte ... (continue)

  This is a book about the music and its relationship with our brains: why sometimes a melody plays again an again into our minds till drive us near crazy? How does musical inspiration happens? It has some quite interesting stories about people that became more music aware and even music talented after having some kind of neurological accident. It talks about a 90 year-old lady that suddenly started to hear the radio music she was exposed to when she was 6 years old. It tells a lot of interesting stories of funny tricks that the brain plays to these people.

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  ariadna73 said on Jun 7, 2010 | Add your feedback

• 

  Sacks' superb writing sheds light and doubts about what music means to mankind.

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  Dalia said on Jan 19, 2010 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

• 

  AMAZING, highly recommendable for anyone who loves music :)

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  Kappa said on Sep 1, 2009 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

• 

  pleasant and readable enough, even if it's mainly a review of case studies of pathologies where music is somehow involved either as a symptom or as a therapy. Most interesting is the question of how music works in the brain.

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  Anmar08 said on May 18, 2009 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

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Book Details

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• English Books
• Hardcover 240 Pages
• ISBN-10: 0330418378
• ISBN-13: 9780330418379
• Publisher: Picador
• Pub date: Nov 02, 2007
• Also available as: Paperback, Audio CD, Others and eBook
• In other languages: other languages Livres Français, Libros en Español, Libri Italiani

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