The Island of the Colour-blind and Cycad Island - Softcover

Sacks, Oliver

3.89

4,888 ratings by Goodreads

9780330350822: The Island of the Colour-blind and Cycad Island

Softcover

ISBN 10: 033035082X ISBN 13: 9780330350822

Publisher: Picador, 1997

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Always fascinated by islands, Oliver Sacks is drawn to the Pacific by reports of the tiny atoll of Pingelap, with its isolated community of islanders born totally colour-blind; and to Guam, where he investigates a puzzling paralysis endemic there for a century. Along the way, he re-encounters the beautiful, primitive island cycad trees – and these become the starting point for a meditation on time and evolution, disease and adaptation, and islands both real and metaphorical.

‘Sacks is rightly renowned for his empathy . . . anyone with a taste for the exotic will find this beautifully written book highly engaging’ Anthony Storr, Sunday Times

‘This is a wonderful book, made better by Sacks’ exceptionally gentle descriptions of patients. He also captures the unimaginable sadness of the Pacific’ Spectator

‘Dr Sacks is an elegant and beguiling writer, and when he describes a condition such as achromatopsia (total colour-blindness), he is not content merely to describe it from the outside, but he tries to imagine what the world is like to a person with the condition’ Sunday Telegraph

‘There is no one at the present time who writes like Oliver Sacks . . . He is a superb clinician who can take a seemingly arid and obscure medical condition, and convert it into a moving, personal odyssey, a testament of tenacity, courage and will’ Anthony Clare, Literary Review

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From the Publisher:

Observant and moving botanical and neurological odyssey
Always fascinated by islands, Oliver Sacks found himself drawn to the tiny Pacific atoll of Pingelap by reports of an isolated community born totally colour-blind. He set up a small clinic and listened to the achromatopic islanders describe their colourless world in rich terms of pattern and tone. And on Guam, where he went to investigate a puzzling endemic neurodegenerative paralysis, he made housecalls in the jungles of primitive cycad trees. The cycads reawakened his lifelong passion for botany, and became starting points for his reflections on the dissemination of the species, the genesis of disease and the nature of deep geologic time. "A testament of tenacity, courage and will" Anthony Clare; "He is a wonderfully acute observer, as well as being a biologist, neurologist, botanist and snorkeller...highly engaging" Anthony Storr, Sunday Times; "A superb clinician who can take a seemingly arid and obscure medical condition, and convert it into a moving, personal odyssey" Anthony Clare, Literary Review

Book Description:

Oliver Sacks travels once again in search of human diversity . . .

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