Call number
Publication
New York: A.A. Knopf: Distributed by Random House, 1997.
Pages
xv; 298
Description
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.… (more)
Awards
Language
Original language
English
Original publication date
1997
Physical description
xv, 298 p.; 8.66 inches
ISBN
0679451145 / 9780679451143
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User reviews
LibraryThing member krazy4katz
I enjoyed the first part of the book immensely, as it was about true colorblindness. People see everything in shades of gray. As a scientist who works on vision, it was fascinating to read the way people adapted to their condition and also uplifting to read how Oliver Sacks and his companions (one
What kept this from being a 4-star book was that I didn't realize this was only half the book. The second half was on islands where mysterious diseases occurred where people developed dementia, parkinson's like symptoms or symptoms of ALS. While this was intellectually interesting, it was terribly depressing and not what I had signed up for. Also there was a large section on native plants. Still, Oliver Sacks is (was) a fantastic writer and has a very keen sense of the humanity of those individuals he talks about. Highly recommended but at least my copy turned out to be different than I thought. I think my edition is actually "The Island of the Colorblind and Cyclad Island". However they seem to be together.
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of which was also achromatic) helped the people on this island. The epidemiology was interesting too. This all began with a storm that killed most of the people on the island…What kept this from being a 4-star book was that I didn't realize this was only half the book. The second half was on islands where mysterious diseases occurred where people developed dementia, parkinson's like symptoms or symptoms of ALS. While this was intellectually interesting, it was terribly depressing and not what I had signed up for. Also there was a large section on native plants. Still, Oliver Sacks is (was) a fantastic writer and has a very keen sense of the humanity of those individuals he talks about. Highly recommended but at least my copy turned out to be different than I thought. I think my edition is actually "The Island of the Colorblind and Cyclad Island". However they seem to be together.
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LibraryThing member JBD1
Sacks' fascinating look at colorblindness and other conditions in several Pacific islands. Witty and absorbing, as with all of the Sacks books I've tried.
LibraryThing member Cygnus555
Such an interesting writer - good book, but it felt too much like a travel log to me. I learned a lot and would recommend it - but also warn that it may take some effort to finish.
LibraryThing member melannen
This review applies to the 1996 Random House abridged audio edition, read by the author.
This book contains two accounts of visits to unusual neurological communities on Pacific Islands: the island of Pingalap in Micronesia, and the Pingalapese, who have the highest rate of congenital total
Both the stories were fascinating, in their accounts of the communities themselves, and the way the diseases had shaped the communities they existed in. As usual, Sacks - part neurologist, part anthropologist, and part story-teller - manages to balance the three roles and pull the reader into the lives of people whose experience of the world is very different from the typical but still very warm and human and real.
I did occasionally, especially in the first half (which could be summarised as "old white men bring sunglasses to the light-sensitive natives) get a slight uncomfortable feeling of exoticization and patronization, not toward the illness but toward the island culture itself, but by halfway through the tape the tone had changed enough that I stopped noticing. My only other problem was that the flow was often choppy, and I would have loved more detail and longer accounts, but that can probably be blamed on the abridgement for the audio version.
Overall, and excellent book, and good listening: holds the attention without losing you if you turn your attention elsewhere for a few minutes.
Also, one of these stories has recent developments, since the book was published - google "lytico-bodig" and "sacks" to find out about it (I don't want to give away the new ending!)
This book contains two accounts of visits to unusual neurological communities on Pacific Islands: the island of Pingalap in Micronesia, and the Pingalapese, who have the highest rate of congenital total
Show More
colorblindess in the world; and the island of Guam, where some island communities were afflicted by a mysterious neurodegenerative disease called lytigo-bodig.Both the stories were fascinating, in their accounts of the communities themselves, and the way the diseases had shaped the communities they existed in. As usual, Sacks - part neurologist, part anthropologist, and part story-teller - manages to balance the three roles and pull the reader into the lives of people whose experience of the world is very different from the typical but still very warm and human and real.
I did occasionally, especially in the first half (which could be summarised as "old white men bring sunglasses to the light-sensitive natives) get a slight uncomfortable feeling of exoticization and patronization, not toward the illness but toward the island culture itself, but by halfway through the tape the tone had changed enough that I stopped noticing. My only other problem was that the flow was often choppy, and I would have loved more detail and longer accounts, but that can probably be blamed on the abridgement for the audio version.
Overall, and excellent book, and good listening: holds the attention without losing you if you turn your attention elsewhere for a few minutes.
Also, one of these stories has recent developments, since the book was published - google "lytico-bodig" and "sacks" to find out about it (I don't want to give away the new ending!)
Show Less
LibraryThing member ruby777
Amazingly well written book by Oliver Sacks, author and neurologist about his journey to the island of Pingelap where the majority of the residents are color blind through intermarriages over the centuries. He has an amazing ability to describe what people perceive and to express it eloquently in
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words. Show Less
LibraryThing member iayork
It is a Worthy Read: Another brilliant book By Dr. Oliver Sacks, this time about a community of color-blinds on a tiny island in the Pacific called Pingelap. He revels in this book that he has a fascination for Islands and when opportunity comes he packs off for this tiny island with two of his
To reach the island they have to do a lot of island hopping and this account itself is worth reflection. There are army bases and nuclear test sites on the tiny island they stop by and the author has reflected well on these issues, their implications and their experiences with army when they get stranded once.
There is a strange quality about Dr. Sacks writing. He can make you wonder and almost enter the lives of the people he talks about. He has done so in his book `The man who mistook his wife for a hat...' and he has done it again in this book. We can probably never even imagine what it is to be color- blind, won't even reflect on something like this, after all we are so caught up in our normal lives. Consider a simple problem of recognising a ripe fruit with out being able to know the colour! But people do adapt and probably as Dr Sacks says they get over compensated in some other way.
The author and his friends get to meet many such people and try to provide the medical opinion but much more than that they get involved with the people, their daily life, their hopes and frustrations. And by the gift of his writing he can take you there too. Just pick up the book. It is not only about color-blinds in a medical sense but about their lives as a whole. And while reading don't ignore the notes to all the pages given at the end of the book. They are many a times much more interesting than the main text. I agree it makes reading a bit cumbersome but it is well worth it.
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friends. One of his friends is from Norway (a psychologist) and himself achromatopic (completely color blind). To reach the island they have to do a lot of island hopping and this account itself is worth reflection. There are army bases and nuclear test sites on the tiny island they stop by and the author has reflected well on these issues, their implications and their experiences with army when they get stranded once.
There is a strange quality about Dr. Sacks writing. He can make you wonder and almost enter the lives of the people he talks about. He has done so in his book `The man who mistook his wife for a hat...' and he has done it again in this book. We can probably never even imagine what it is to be color- blind, won't even reflect on something like this, after all we are so caught up in our normal lives. Consider a simple problem of recognising a ripe fruit with out being able to know the colour! But people do adapt and probably as Dr Sacks says they get over compensated in some other way.
The author and his friends get to meet many such people and try to provide the medical opinion but much more than that they get involved with the people, their daily life, their hopes and frustrations. And by the gift of his writing he can take you there too. Just pick up the book. It is not only about color-blinds in a medical sense but about their lives as a whole. And while reading don't ignore the notes to all the pages given at the end of the book. They are many a times much more interesting than the main text. I agree it makes reading a bit cumbersome but it is well worth it.
Show Less
LibraryThing member wester
This is the kind of book that will teach you a lot of facts, about Micronesia, colourblindness, cycads and a rare disease, without it ever becoming dry or overly academic. It is simply saturated with Oliver Sacks' infectious enthousiasm and love for all that he describes, so that as you read it,
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you start to care for these islands and all that's in them as well. Show Less
LibraryThing member SimoneA
This is another enjoyable book by Oliver Sacks. In general, it reads quite easily, and Sacks' style is very accessible. The book is divided into multiple parts, some of which stood out, positively or negatively. The part about the color blindness and the lytico-bodig were very interesting and well
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described, with a nice balance between the medicine and the personal. However, I found the parts about the cycads a bit boring, so I started skipping those a bit when they got too long. If you like other books by Oliver Sacks, this is a nice addition to your collection. If you've never read Sacks before, I agree with a previous reviewer that it may be better to start with The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat. Show Less
LibraryThing member georgeslacombe
I've read the portuguese translation of this book.
LibraryThing member starbox
"Islands were, so to speak, experiments of nature", August 7, 2014
This review is from: The Island of the Colour-blind (Hardcover)
An interesting account of two trips made by the author to the islands of Oceania, where the remoteness of the locations have led to two different illnesses among the
The first section of the book - and to me, by far the most readable - was his visit to Pingelap atoll in Micronesia, where interbreeding of a small population has led to 1 person in 12 being totally colour-blind. Finding out how life 'feels' to such people, along with a fascinating travelogue, made this a wonderful read:
"And in that first long moment, with the children coming out of the forest...and the tropical luxuriance of vegetation in all directions - the beauty of the primitive, the human and the natural took hold of me...I had a sense of paradise, of an almost magical reality."
"Little black-and-white piglets darted across our path...we were struck by the fact that the pigs were black and white and wondered, half seriously, if they had been specially bred for, or by, an achromatic population."
In the second section, Sacks visits Guam, where the illness of lytico-bodig (similar to motor neurone disease) was endemic - although the younger generation are no longer affected. Again the travel aspect was fascinating - Sacks' experience of arrival in a US military base seems as bad as any totalitarian state. And the efforts of scientists to crack the reason for the disease (blamed by many on the toxic cycad trees, whose roots were once used as flour) was fairly interesting. But I found the end of the chapter starting to get a bit too scientific for me!
In the third, short chapter, Sacks visits Rota, close to Guam but unspoiled. Here he visits the cycad jungle, similar to the primeval world, and observes that "it seemed as if my senses were actually enlarging, as if a new sense, a time sense, was opening within me, something which might allow me to appreciate millennia or aeons as directly as I had experienced seconds or minutes."
Contains a number of b/w drawings
This review is from: The Island of the Colour-blind (Hardcover)
An interesting account of two trips made by the author to the islands of Oceania, where the remoteness of the locations have led to two different illnesses among the
Show More
locals.The first section of the book - and to me, by far the most readable - was his visit to Pingelap atoll in Micronesia, where interbreeding of a small population has led to 1 person in 12 being totally colour-blind. Finding out how life 'feels' to such people, along with a fascinating travelogue, made this a wonderful read:
"And in that first long moment, with the children coming out of the forest...and the tropical luxuriance of vegetation in all directions - the beauty of the primitive, the human and the natural took hold of me...I had a sense of paradise, of an almost magical reality."
"Little black-and-white piglets darted across our path...we were struck by the fact that the pigs were black and white and wondered, half seriously, if they had been specially bred for, or by, an achromatic population."
In the second section, Sacks visits Guam, where the illness of lytico-bodig (similar to motor neurone disease) was endemic - although the younger generation are no longer affected. Again the travel aspect was fascinating - Sacks' experience of arrival in a US military base seems as bad as any totalitarian state. And the efforts of scientists to crack the reason for the disease (blamed by many on the toxic cycad trees, whose roots were once used as flour) was fairly interesting. But I found the end of the chapter starting to get a bit too scientific for me!
In the third, short chapter, Sacks visits Rota, close to Guam but unspoiled. Here he visits the cycad jungle, similar to the primeval world, and observes that "it seemed as if my senses were actually enlarging, as if a new sense, a time sense, was opening within me, something which might allow me to appreciate millennia or aeons as directly as I had experienced seconds or minutes."
Contains a number of b/w drawings
Show Less
LibraryThing member nancynova
rabck from GoryDetails; I don't think I'll look at all the green tropical plants the same way again. Although the title purports the neurologist's investigation into the incidence of color blindness on an island in Micronesia, the author also ventures to other islands to study other diseases, and
Definitely read the notes at the end - they provide more valuable insight into the different chapters
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his side passion for cycadsDefinitely read the notes at the end - they provide more valuable insight into the different chapters
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LibraryThing member mirrani
To have a book cover the topic of genetic issues and illnesses like colorblindness and lytico-bodig was interesting. To find it quotable made it thoroughly enjoyable. I was quite surprised at how much I experienced while reading this book. The author describes his travels in such a way that is both
For people interested in genetics or the culture of a people dealing with genetic issues, this is a book that must be picked up. For others, it is still an enjoyable education. No sleeping in this class.
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captivating and fascinating, and manages to make the issues more human than scientific or technical. As a reader I found I was learning more about both issues than I ever expected to learn from a book about either.For people interested in genetics or the culture of a people dealing with genetic issues, this is a book that must be picked up. For others, it is still an enjoyable education. No sleeping in this class.
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