The Island of the Colorblind (Paperback)

In assessing the symptoms and the environments, Sacks also conveys a sensitive rendering of the islands' histories and current situations. Whalers, missionaries and the U.S. Navy have brought plagues, displaced the inhabitants and ignored their impacts. Indigenous populations have been decimated by diseases introduced by Europeans and North Americans. It's an old, wearying story, but it must be told with honesty and perception.

Sacks does just that, with deep human feeling that makes this book captivating reading. There's few things as frightening as a latent illness that seems to strike at whim. Since "bugs" or even genetic origins aren't easily discerned in these cases, it makes the physician's task that much more exacting. Sacks keeps the reader at his side with finesse as he tours the islands, examines the suffering and describes the efforts to counter the misery. It's a call for others to take up the challenge, and he offers tools in the massive notes and bibliography. It's a challenge worth pursuing. Anyone entering medicine will find this book valuable. For the rest of us, it's an inspirational volume, well told, with valuable insight to a dedicated doctor's experiences.[stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

Having just finished the book today, I am aware of a sadness within me, a sadness that my journey to the South Pacific with Dr. Sacks has ended. I return to my clinic tomorrow morning to see patients, but my heart for some days to come will be on Pingelap, or Guam, or.......

Oliver Sacks writes: "I went to Micronesia as a neurologist, or neutoanthropologist, intent on seeing how individuals and communities responded to unusual endemic conditions - a hereditary total colorblindness on Pingelap and Pohnpei; a progressive fatal neurodegenerative disorder on Guam and Rota. But I also found myself riveted by the cultural life and history of these islands, their unique flora and fauna, their singular geologic origins. If seeing patients, visiting archeological sites, wandering in rain forests, snorkelling in the reefs, at first seemed to bear no relation to each other, they then fused into a single unpartitioneable experience, a total immersion in island life."

And that is where Oliver Sacks takes you, from Fuur, in Jutland to Berkeley in California to Martha's Vineyard to Micronesia and along the way he serves up a fine helping of his childhood and an exquisite selection of botanical pen and ink drawings.

What I have liked about reading an Oliver Sacks book is that he will offer you a variegated read with a thick and juicy notes section. He writes about all manner of things; sunsets and airplane flights; friends with maskun and scotopic times; coconut crabs and cycad ferns; all in a colorful and articulate language. Oliver Sacks is one scientist who has not lost his awe, wonder and keen observational skills.

I learnt as much about ferns growing in a garden during his London childhood as the ferns that flourished and supported whole dynasties of dinosaurs and modern island communities; about his literary heroes, his dreams and his schoolmates' appetites for botany and biology.

As much about medicine and anthropology as life lived at the ends of the earth. You'll learn about Darwin's trip around the world and about sakau, a local beverage with lively powers. You'll be treated to grand views of little islands and close-up insights of how people with colorblindness see this world. Absorbing postprandrial remeniscences. Do check out my site for my full review.