The Island of the Colorblind Paperback - 1998
by Oliver Sacks
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.
From the jacket 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.
Details
- Title The Island of the Colorblind
- Author Oliver Sacks
- Binding Paperback
- Edition [ Edition: Repri
- Pages 336
- Volumes 1
- Language ENG
- Publisher Vintage, New York, New York, U.S.A.
- Date 1998-01-12
- Illustrated Yes
- Features Maps
- ISBN 9780375700736 / 0375700730
- Weight 0.75 lbs (0.34 kg)
- Dimensions 8.02 x 5.17 x 0.72 in (20.37 x 13.13 x 1.83 cm)
- Library of Congress subjects Color blindness - Caroline Islands, Parkinsonism - Guam
- Library of Congress Catalog Number 96034252
- Dewey Decimal Code 617.759
Excerpt
Media reviews
Citations
- New York Times, 02/08/1998, Page 28
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