In this 1995 book, Oliver Sacks builds on the work he started in the celebrated The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, but with longer, more in-depth essays and far fewer case studies. Sacks continues his game-changing focus on patients as complex people grappling with often debilitating conditions, who are nonetheless active agents in their own experiences, as opposed to being passive subjects for doctors.

It is through this lens that he tells the eponymous “paradoxical” tales contained in this book: a painter with a condition that leaves him being unable to see colour, a surgeon and amateur pilot who has Tourette’s Syndrome, a blind man who gained sight later in life.

In each of the seven cases, Sacks demonstrates how the people adapt to their conditions. As he writes in the preface, “It is the paradox of disease, in this sense, its 'creative' potential, that forms the central theme of this book.”

Published in 1995.