Creative disorders

Oliver Sacks’s An Anthropologist from Mars (Picador, £6.99, ISBN 0 330 34347 5) has just appeared in paperback. So if your local library cuts were too severe last year for many new volumes to appear on the shelves or you were too strapped for cash to buy the hardback, here’s an affordable version. “Defects, disorders, diseases … can play a paradoxical role, by bringing out latent powers, developments, evolutions”, says Sacks, as he explores this paradox of disease – its creative potential – in seven people’s lives.