People

By Sara C. Medina

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is surely the season's strangest book title. Nonetheless, the collection of literate yet authoritative case studies by Neurologist Oliver Sacks, 52, has been on bestseller lists across the country these past 13 weeks. "I am equally interested in diseases and people," says Sacks, who teaches and practices in New York City, and his accounts of loss, excess and aberration always seek the individual behind the disorder. Perhaps because such a readable combination of erudition and compassion is so rare, Sacks' four books have earned him a quasineurological disorder of his own: the assault of fame. "There are too many letters and phone calls," he laments. "After a while I long to get away." He has just done so, visiting his home in London. One's roots can, after all, inspire one to keep going. His father is a physician who still practices at 90.