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Original Title: The Island of the Colourblind
ISBN: 0375700730 (ISBN13: 9780375700736)
Edition Language: English
Setting: Pingelap(Micronesia, Federated States of) Guam
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The Island of the Colorblind Paperback | Pages: 311 pages
Rating: 3.88 | 4121 Users | 278 Reviews

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As an admirer of Oliver Sacks’s clear, inquisitive articles on neurobiology, I was saddened to discover that his travelogue of Micronesia is both patronizing and exoticizing.

Throughout this book, Sacks employs the same tone he uses when discussing patients with debilitating medical ailments, a kind of sympathetic wonderment at the bizarre feats performed damaged brains. Here, this tone is applied to entire populations and cultures, as when he describes the ponderously fat islanders whose diets include vast quantities of Spam. He casually remarks that the Micronesians might have practiced cannibalism, and that Spam’s popularity might therefore be attributed its similarity in flavor to the taste of human flesh.

Needless to say, this is a preposterous and racist supposition. In the Pacific islands (where I grew up), communities and economies were devastated by both World War II and decades of colonial occupation. People became dependent on Spam and other high-sodium, high-fat, high-sugar tinned products imported and distributed by the United States military. Obesity and diabetes are the natural consequences of replacing a native, lean, seafood diet with one manufactured by ConAgra. But Sacks is delighted by the possibility of remote island peoples retaining their primitive (and putative) taste for human flesh, and so fails to explore the more prosaic, less sensational truth.

Elsewhere, he is paternalistic in a reflexive, unthinking way. He described seeing beautiful children running in packs, as wild animals, and his urge to pluck them up and keep them. It is an offhand remark, but one that stings. This kind of thoughtless condescension, wherein he treats islanders as exotic foreign specimens rather than people, crops up repeatedly.

Still, Sacks is a terrific writer with an unrivaled instinct for describing the indescribable. He writes stunningly of the out-of-body disorientation caused by kava-kava, and imagines the experience of a color-blind person seeing the world through textures. He describes the experience of aging into a state of neurodegenerative paralysis, and shows remarkable breadth of knowledge over the disease’s possible botanical causes. The neurological disorders at the heart of the book are legitimately unique and fascinating – if only Sacks didn’t see fit to treat the people like the disease.

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Title:The Island of the Colorblind
Author:Oliver Sacks
Book Format:Paperback
Book Edition:Anniversary Edition
Pages:Pages: 311 pages
Published:January 12th 1998 by Vintage (first published 1996)
Categories:Nonfiction. Science. Psychology. Health. Medicine. Travel. Biology. Neuroscience

Rating Epithetical Books The Island of the Colorblind
Ratings: 3.88 From 4121 Users | 278 Reviews

Comment On Epithetical Books The Island of the Colorblind
I've loved Oliver Sacks for a long time, but up until now I'd only read and re-read The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars. The Island of the Colorblind seemed like a natural next choice for me, because it combines my interest in neuropsychology with my interest in island biogeography (the study of the way species on islands evolve to become very specialized, to the point where an extremely high percentage of the species on any given island may be endemic to that

There is a type of complete colorblindness, achromatopsia, where people do not have functional cones in their eyes and are almost blind in sunlight because of the sensitivity of the rods. Achromatopsia, unlike red-green colorblindness, is very rare. The island of Fuur and the island of Pingelap both had large numbers of people suffering from this congenital achromatopsia. Only Pingelap, in the south Pacific, still has large numbers of achromatopes. The author visited Pingelap with a physiologist

The book is very informative and as someone who is fascinated by research, I liked it. The islands, the people, the sickness were wonders. I came to ponder, "What could it be like to never know colors?" And I was also quite stirred by the mysteriously caused lytico-bodig. A disease such as it exists and affects a lot of families and yet no one knows how it chooses its victims.

This is mainly a more or less ill-informed travelogue by a person interested in neurological diseases. The core of the book is Sacks' visit to Guam in the 1990s to check out Lytico-Bodig disease, an ALS-like disease once endemic on this island.Alas, there's not much to the book. Sacks relates a bit about the research of others and his visits to patients with the disease who are under the care of Dr. John C. Steele.I say ill-informed travelogue because his knowledge of Guam and the other islands

As read hereAwakenings by Oliver Sacks might be regarded as one of the most poetic stories ever told. When brought to the corporate Hollywood screens, it caused an enormous impact on its audience, propelling the authors name into the luminous aura of mainstream culture. In itself, The Island of the Colorblind serves as the logic continuation of the literary brilliance found in his previous works. In it, the renowned neurologist recounts his experiences during his summer visit to the Pacific

I KNEW, KNEW that Oliver Sacks wouldn't give me informative details on the epidemiology of islands. His chatty, superficial, and self-absorbed style made me drop both his Hat and Awakenings books and give it 4 stars anyway, out of what, charity? But this one I bought new, with high hopes anyway, and it quickly became apparent that there is something seriously wrong with this man. By page 30 he'd spent several pages talking about his prowess as a swimmer, being a Victorian reader who always

In his autobiography, Oliver Sacks writes that this is the favorite of his books. He must be so close to it that he finds something here most readers don't. I liked the part about cycads.