The Island of the Colorblind and Cycad Island
 Oliver Sacks
 (Reviewed by The Editor - Rebecca Brown)
 1998 Vintage Books NY USA
  ISBN: 0375700730


On the tiny Pacific atoll of Pingelap thrives a community born totally colorblind who can describe their world in rich terms of patterns & tones.

Oliver Sacks writes: “I went to Micronesia as a neurologist, or neutoanthropologist, intent on seeing how individuals and communities responded to unusual endemic conditions - a hereditary total colorblindness on Pingelap and Pohnpei; a progressive fatal neurodegenerative disorder on Guam and Rota. But I also found myself riveted by the cultural life and history of these islands, their unique flora and fauna, their singular geologic origins. If seeing patients, visiting archeological sites, wandering in rain forests, snorkelling in the reefs, at first seemed to bear no relation to each other, they then fused into a single unpartitioneable experience, a total immersion in island life.”

And that is where Oliver Sacks takes you, from Fuur, in Jutland to Berkeley in California to Martha's Vineyard to Micronesia and along the way he serves up a fine helping of his childhood and an exquisite selection of botanical pen and ink drawings.

“As a child I had visual migraines, where I would have not only the classical scintillations and alterations of the visual field, but alterations in the sense of color too, which might weaken or entirely disappear for a few minutes...(which) made me wonder what it would be like to live in a completely colorless world, not just for a few minutes, but permanently. It was not until many years later that I got an answer”.

What I have liked about reading an Oliver Sacks book is that he will offer you a variegated read with a thick and juicy notes section. He writes about all manner of things; sunsets and airplane flights; friends with maskun and scotopic times; coconut crabs and cycad ferns; all in a colorful and articulate language. Oliver Sacks is one scientist who has not lost his awe, wonder and keen observational skills.

I learnt as much about ferns growing in a garden during his London childhood as the ferns that flourished and supported whole dynasties of dinosaurs and modern island communities; about his literary heroes, his dreams and his schoolmates' appetites for botany and biology. As much about medicine and anthropology as life lived at the ends of the earth. You'll learn about Darwin's trip around the world and about sakau, a local beverage with lively powers. You'll be treated to grand views of little islands and close-up insights of how people with colorblindness see this world.

His section on the Cycad Island where the very foods they eat are destroying the brains of certain generations of islanders and how families are dignifying their stricken kinfolk with full and loved lives, reverberates to this day. Oliver Sacks is a thinker and writer with whom I relish contact.

Also by Oliver Sacks: Migraine; Awakenings; A Leg to Stand On; The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat; Seeing Voices; An Anthropologist on Mars
(04/12/99)

Rebecca