The Island of the Colorblind

"Sacks' most personal book yet-- a book that pulls a reader into it. If there is a single message to be found in [it], it is that life without joy, life without compassion, would be a sorry thing indeed. Buy many copies of this book and give them to your friends." -The Calgary Herald

"A delight.... The Island of the Colorblind fits comfortably on the shelf reserved for the best sort of travel writing, where everything under the sun is a candidate for inclusion.... In a tropical setting, amid the coral reefs and cycads ... the Victorian naturalist in Sacks blossoms, and his touch is lighter than ever." -NOW

"A grand entertainment, a trove of learning. It is [Sacks'] combination of the artist's eye and the healer's touch that makes [his] work -- and the man himself -- so memorable. Unfailingly tolerant, open and curious, he humanizes everything he touches.... This makes him for many-- our prophet of understanding." -Martin Levin, The Globe and Mail

Oliver Sacks has always been fascinated by islands--their remoteness, their mystery, above all the unique forms of life they harbor. For him, 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.

The islands reawaken Sacks's lifelong passion for botany--in particular, for the primitive cycad trees, whose existence dates back to the Paleozoic--and the cycads are the starting point for an intensely personal reflection on the meaning of islands, the dissemination of species, the genesis of disease, and the nature of deep geologic time. Out of an 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 complexities of being human.