In his books An Anthropologist on Mars and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks details the lives of patients isolated by neurological disorders, shedding light on our common humanity and the ways in which we perceive the world around us. Now he looks at the effects of physical isolation in The Island of the Colorblind. On this journey, he carried with him the intellectual curiousity, kind understanding, and unique vision he has so consistently demonstrated. Drawn to the Micronesian island of Pingelap by reports of a community of people born totally colorblind, Dr. Sacks set up a clinic in a one-room dispensary. There he listened to patients describe their colorless world in terms rich with pattern and tone, luminance and shadow. Then, in Guam, he investigated a puzzling neurodegenerative paralysis, making housecalls amid crowing cockerels, cycad jungles, and the remains of a colonial culture. The experience affords Sacks an opportunity to elaborate on such personal passions as botany and history and to explore the meaning of islands, the dissemination of species, the birth of disease, and the nature of deep geologic time.


From Publishers Weekly
Neurologist Sacks, famed for his investigations of unusual medical conditions (The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, etc.), went to Micronesia in 1993 to study firsthand two rare disorders: achromatopsia, or total congenital color blindness, which afflicts more than 5% of the population on the islands of Pingelap and Pohnpei; and lytico-bodig, a fatal, progressive neurodegenerative disease common in Guam, causing paralysis, dementia and catatonia. His total immersion in island life makes this luminous, beautifully written report a wondrous voyage of discovery. Most of those born color-blind never learn to read because they can't see the teacher's writing on the board; they can't work outdoors in bright light, and are unable to see fine detail; yet many achromatopes, Sacks found, develop acute compensatory memory skills and curiosity and thus live in a world of heightened reality. On Guam he visited families tragically scarred by lytico-bodig, a disease blamed by some scientists on the natives' ingestion of cycad trees' toxic seeds; other researchers suspect that the cause can be traced to a virus, diet as a whole or genetics. With aplomb, Sacks wears many hats?cultural anthropologist, naturalist, explorer, ethnographer, neuroscientist?as he delves into the islands' volcanic origins, their archeological wonders (e.g., Pohnpei's megalithic ruins, remnants of a monumental civilization), their unique flora and fauna (nocturnal tree-climbing snakes, iridescent ferns, dwarf forests), their bloody colonial history under Spanish and German rule, their still active indigenous myths. 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. Illustrated with drawings, maps. 150,000 first printing; Literary Guild selection; Random House audio. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From School Library Journal
YA. Fans of Sacks's previous publications will be enchanted by the newest work of the famous neurologist. Written as a travelogue/medical adventure, the book is actually an account of two separate observational journeys. The first, to an island in Micronesia called Pingelap, was to observe a community with an extraordinary large number of the population suffering from an inherited colorblindness. The author offers a vivid description of this handicap: extreme sensitivity to light, less than one tenth of normal vision, and a lack of fixation of the eyes resulting in repeated "nystagmic jerks." The second voyage was to Guam to observe the sufferers of lytico-bodig. Victims can have progressive paralysis, Parkinson-like symptoms, or even dementia. The clear way in which the author portrays the human spirit coping with vast disabilities will appeal to YAs interested in medical and science oddities. From night fishing with achromotopes on Pingelap to playing catch with a "frozen" bodig sufferer on Guam, Sacks carries readers along on a wave of interest and opens a fascinating, little-known world. Students who are looking for science, medical, or travelogue literature?or just attention-grabbing reading?will be swept away by The Island of the Colorblind.?Carol DeAngelo, formerly at Fairfax County Public Library, VACopyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Avid users of audiobooks often risk their listening time on works they might never choose to read. Anyone stuck in commuter traffic, washing dishes, or waiting at an airport will know the welcome relief of becoming lost in a foreign subject. This unique audiobook certainly provides the listener with an unusual and refreshing experience. Out in the middle of the Pacific, not terribly far from Guam, exists an island where an unusually large percentage of the population suffer from a severe and very rare form of colorblindness. The author uses his investigation of this phenomenon to introduce the compelling story of the islands, genetics, human migration, and unusual kindness. Sacks himself reads, providing a flawless narration. This program is not for everyone's taste, but it merits inclusion in any collection where serious subjects are addressed.?Ray Vignovich, West Des Moines P.L., Ia.Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, D.M. Thomas
An explorer of that most wondrous of islands, the human brain, Oliver Sacks also loves the oceanic kind.... Attracted by reports of an isolated community of color-blind people on a Micronesian island, he set off to find it.... A blend of observation, reflection, medical exploration and autobiography, it is as strong as anything Dr. Sacks has written.


The New York Times Book Review, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
Dr. Sacks' humane inquisitiveness lends a philosophical perspective to every threatening change. His scenes are stills from the moving picture of timeless evolution. And the way his subjects accept their fate redeems his story from gloom, even lending it a certain gaiety.


From Booklist
Sacks varies the recipe that pleased the myriad readers of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1986), Awakenings (1990), and An Anthropologist on Mars (1995). To the investigation of strange neuropathies (amnesia, Tourette's syndrome, autism, etc.) that has been his stock, he now adds dollops of travel writing and botany in the two long essays of this book. Sacks had long wanted to investigate congenital color blindness; it occurs disproportionately on two Caroline Islands, Pingelap and Pohnpei. Sacks repaired to these dots in the Pacific accompanied by two other researchers, one a color-blind native of a Danish island where the condition also flourished. Reporting this journey, Sacks records the incidents of travel and the islands' geography and history as well as his discoveries about lifelong color blindness. Later, Sacks went to Guam to observe another insular abnormality, a degenerative condition that resembles either ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease), Alzheimer's, or parkinsonism and that plagues only ethnic islanders. As a pendant to his report on this malady, Sacks indulges his love of jungles in a rapturous description of Guam's tiny neighbor, Rota. The forest there is one of the few still dominated by cycads, an ancient, palmlike order whose poisonous seeds are implicated as a cofactor in the causation of Guam's mysterious illness. Despite some travel-writing commonplaces, this is another Sacks spellbinder. Ray Olson


From Kirkus Reviews
Sacks's fans are in for a treat: This is a magical medical mystery tour of South Sea islands that goes beyond the neurological lore to reveal the good doctor as historian, botanist, environmentalist, anthropologist, and, as always, caring human being. This is really two books. The first is an examination of natives of the Micronesian island of Pingelap, where a high percentage are born without color-sensing cells, or cones, in their retinas. Thus, they have no experience of color and also lack visual acuity; on the other hand, they have accommodated with increased sensitivity to texture. They are also acutely sensitive to light and squint in daylight, seeking the comfort of twilight or nightfall as their best times. Sacks is accompanied by an ophthalmologist and a Norwegian scientist who is also an ``achromatope.'' History and politics explain how there can be such high prevalence of a rare genetic disease: With an island's population reduced by severe climatic catastrophes or by colonizers, a mutant gene can spread through the surviving inbred community. Guam is the site of the second neurological phenomenon- -one that remains a mystery. Numbers of native Chamorros suffer from ``lytico-bodig''--a kind of triple-threat neuropathology that can take the form of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, various kinds of parkinsonism, or dementia. Here Sacks and his companionate physicians are revealed as marvelously empathic in their visits to afflicted families. There is more to the Guam story, however. The celebration of nature, the stories of Sacks's youth in England, his lifelong love of plants, and the fragility of the islands form a passionate subtheme. Military operation, and tourism with hotels and golf courses are the contemporary versions of the colonizer mentality that wrought havoc in the past. Yet scenes of surpassing beauty remain, and we have Sacks to thank for recording them along with the examples of indomitable will and adaption that humans can manifest. (10 drawings, 2 maps) (First printing of 150,000; Literary Guild alternate selection; author tour) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Mother Jones
...a shrewd reminder of the incongruities natural selection places upon us.


Review
"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


Review
"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


Book Description
"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


From the Publisher
"With aplomb, Sacks wears many hats -- cultural anthropologist, naturalist, explorer, ethnographer, neuroscientist -- as he delves into the islands' volcanic origins, their archeological wonders, their unique flora and fauna, their bloody colonial history under Spanish and German rule, their still active indigenous myths. 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."
-Publisher's Weekly


From the Inside Flap
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' 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.


From the Hardcover edition.

FROM OUR EDITORS

Drawn to the tiny atoll of Pingelap where the natives are born color-blind, Sacks listens to the islanders describe their world in ways he never thought possible. Other island-hopping adventures include encounters in Pohnpei, Cycad, and Rota.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

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 colorblind, 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' 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.

FROM THE CRITICS

Charles Taylor

Oliver Sacks' writings are as much about his own curiosity as they are about the medical mysteries he investigates. At his best, he removes any sense of embarrassment from his inquires. Perhaps better than any other writer, he understands what someone explains to him in his new book, Island of the Colorblind: that a sick person's sickness must become an acknowledged part of our response to that human being. Sacks' curiosity is the real thing. It is also, judging by this book, starting to wear a bit.

The tour of the Pacific islands Sacks writes about here resulted from a dovetailing of two interests: a lifelong fascination with islands and the case of an artist who went colorblind after a car accident, which is described in his last book, An Anthropologist on Mars. Sacks had heard about an island where a large number of the inhabitants were colorblind. He enlisted the aid of Knut Nordby, a Norwegian physiologist who had written about a similar island in Norway. What they found on their journey makes up the first half of the book, while Sacks' trip to Guam, where a number of people suffered from a mysterious virus, makes up the second half. He sums up the elusive nature of this island disease thus: "The disease is indeed dying out at last, and the researchers who seek its cause grow more pressured, more vexed, by the day: Will the quarry ... elude them finally, tantalizingly, by disappearing at the moment they are about to grasp it?"