The Island of the Colorblind - by Oliver Sacks (Paperback)

About the Book

From the bestselling author of "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" and "An Anthropologist on Mars" comes "a delightful inner and outer journey, destined to surprise and please the devoted Sacks reader" ("Washington Post")--a work rich in curiosity and compassion and intellectual adventure. 20 illustrations. 3 maps.

Book Synopsis

Part travelogue, part autobiography, part medical mystery, this moving book by the "poet laureate of medicine" (The New York Times) and bestselling author of Awakenings takes us to a tiny Pacific atoll and the island of Guam to explore the genesis of disease, the wonders of botany, and the complexities of being human.

"Sacks's total immersion in island life makes this luminous, beautifully written report a wonderous voyage of discovery. As a travel writer, Sacks ranks with Paul Theroux and Bruce Chatwin. As an investigator of the mind's mysteries, he is in a class by himself."
--Publishers Weekly

For Oliver Sacks, islands conjure up equally the romance of Melville and Stevenson, the adventure of Magellan and Cook, and the scientific wonder of Darwin and Wallace.

Drawn to the tiny Pacific atoll of Pingelap by intriguing reports of an isolated community of islanders born totally color-blind, Sacks finds himself setting up a clinic in a one-room island dispensary, where he listens to these achromatopic islanders describe their colorless world in rich terms of pattern and tone, luminance and shadow. And on Guam, where he goes to investigate the puzzling neurodegenerative paralysis endemic there for a century, he becomes, for a brief time, an island neurologist, making house calls with his colleague John Steele, amid crowing cockerels, cycad jungles, and the remains of a colonial culture.

Out of this unexpected journey, Sacks has woven an unforgettable narrative which immerses us in the romance of island life, and shares his own compelling vision of the mysteries of being human.

Review Quotes

"Magical . . . Sacks's fans are in for a treat." --Kirkus

"An explorer of that most wonderous of islands, the human brain," writes D.M. Thomas in The New York Times Book Review, "Oliver Sacks also loves the oceanic kind of islands." Both kinds figure movingly in this book--part travelogue, part autobiography, part medical mystery story--in which Sacks's journeys to a tiny Pacific atoll and the island of Guam become explorations of the time, and the complexities of being human.

"Sacks's total immersion in islands life makes this luminous, beautifully written report a wonderous voyage of discovery. As a travel writer, Sacks ranks with Paul Theroux and Bruce Chatwin. As an investigator of the mind's mysteries, he is in a class by himself."
--Publishers Weekly

About the Author

Oliver Sacks was a neurologist, writer, and professor of medicine. Born in London in 1933, he moved to New York City in 1965, where he launched his medical career and began writing case studies of his patients. Called the "poet laureate of medicine" by The New York Times, Sacks is the author of thirteen books, including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Musicophilia, and Awakenings, which inspired an Oscar-nominated film and a play by Harold Pinter. He was the recipient of many awards and honorary degrees, and was made a Commander of the British Empire in 2008 for services to medicine. He died in 2015.