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Part travelogue, part autobiography, part medical mystery, this moving book by the "poet laureate of medicine" (The New York Times) and bestselling author of Awakenings takes us to a tiny Pacific atoll and the island of Guam to explore the genesis of disease, the wonders of botany, and the complexities of being human. "Sacks's total immersion in island 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
For Oliver Sacks, 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. Out of this 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 mysteries of being human.
Part travelogue, part autobiography, part medical mystery, this moving book by the "poet laureate of medicine" (The New York Times) and bestselling author of Awakenings takes us to a tiny Pacific atoll and the island of Guam to explore the genesis of disease, the wonders of botany, and the complexities of being human. "Sacks's total immersion in island 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
For Oliver Sacks, 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. Out of this 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 mysteries of being human.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Excerpts-
Chapter One
Islands have always fascinated me; perhaps they fascinate everyone. The first summer holiday I remember — I was just three years old — was a visit to the Isle of Wight. There are only fragments in memory — the cliffs of many-colored sands, the wonder of the sea, which I was seeing for the first time: it's calmness, its gentle swell, its warmth, entranced me; its roughness, when the wind rose, terrified me. My father told me that he had won a race swimming round the Isle of Wight before I was born, and this made me think of him as a giant, a hero.
Stories of islands, and seas, and ships and mariners entered my consciousness very early — my mother would tell me about Captain Cook, about Magellan and Tasman and Dampier and Bougainville, and all the islands and peoples they had discovered, and she would point them out to me on the globe. Islands were special places, remote and mysterious, intensely attractive, yet frightening too. I remember being terrified by a children's encyclopedia with a picture of the great blind statues of Easter Island looking out to sea, as I read that the Islanders had lost the power to sail away from the island and were totally cut off from the rest on humanity, doomed to die in utter isolation.
I read about castaways, desert islands, prison islands, leper islands. I adored The Lost World, Conan Doyle's splendid yarn about an isolated South American plateau full of dinosaurs and Jurassic lifeforms — in effect, an island marooned in time (I knew the book virtually by heart, and dreamed of growing up to be another Professor Challenger.)
I was very impressionable and readily made other people's imaginings my own. H.G. Wells was particularly potent—all desert islands, for me, became his Aepyornis Island or, in a nightmare mode, the island of Dr. Moreau. Later, when I came to read Herman Melville and Robert Louis Stevenson, the real and the imaginary fused in my mind. Did the Marquesas actually exist? Were Omoo and Typee actual adventures? I felt this uncertainty most especially about the Galapagos, for long before I read Darwin, I knew of them as the "evilly enchanted" isles of Melville's Encantadas.
Later still, factual and scientific accounts began to dominate my reading — Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle, Wallace's Malay Archipelago, and my favorite, Humboldt's Personal Narrative (I loved especially his description of the six thousand year old dragon tree on Tenerife) — and now the sense of the romantic, the mythical, the mysterious, became subordinated to the passion of scientific curiosity. For islands were, so to speak, experiments of nature, places blessed or cursed by geographic singularity to harbor unique forms of life — the aye-ayes and pottos, the lorises and lemurs of Madagascar; the great tortoises of the Galapagos; the giant flightless birds of New Zealand — all singular species or genera which had taken a separate evolutionary path in their isolated habitats. And I was strangely pleased by a phrase in one of Darwin's diaries, written after he had seen a kangaroo in Australia and found this so extraordinary and alien that he wondered if it did not represent a second creation.
As a child I had visual migraines, where I would have not only the classical scintillations and alterations of the visual fields, but alterations in the sense of color too, which might weaken or entirely disappear for a few minutes. This experience frightened me, but tantalized me too, and 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, at least a...
About the Author-
Oliver Sacks was born in London in 1933 and educated in London, Oxford, and California. He is a professor of neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and the author of seven books, including Awakenings, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and An Anthropologist on Mars. He lives on City Island in New York, where he swims and raises cycads and ferns.
Reviews-
Publishers Weekly
"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."
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Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
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Bahrain, Egypt, Hong Kong, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the Sudan, the Syrian Arab Republic, Tunisia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen
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