| The Island of the Colorblind Contributor(s): Sacks, Oliver (Author) |
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ISBN: 0375700730 ISBN-13: 9780375700736 Publisher: Vintage OUR PRICE: $17.10 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: January 1998 Annotation: 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. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Medical | Essays - Fiction - Science | Life Sciences - Human Anatomy & Physiology |
| Dewey: 617.759 |
| LCCN: 96034252 |
| Physical Information: 0.72" H x 5.17" W x 8.02" (0.75 lbs) 336 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: An explorer of that most wondrous 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 meaning of islands, the genesis of disease, the wonders of botany, the nature of deep geological time, and the complexities of being human. |