SOURCE: Kohn, Marek. “Voyages to Inner Space.” New Statesman & Society 8, no. 340 (17 February 1995): 49.

In the following review of An Anthropologist on Mars, Kohn praises Sacks's case histories of patients suffering from neurological afflictions as poignant and insightful.

Already, the most frequently asked question about Dr Sacks' new collection of case studies [An Anthropologist on Mars] appears to be whether the title is biographical or autobiographical. The obsession with the doctor at the expense of the patient is retrograde. Like any author, Sacks sees his own vision in his subjects. But he is essentially contemplative, which transforms the traditional air of mastery that pervades the doctor-patient relationship in most physicians' prose. He is at his best with Temple Grandin, an animal scientist who writes about her autism. They meet as equals; scientists of autism both, since Grandin is the nearest a person gets to being a dispassionate observer of herself...