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 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.

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 words.

Interessante e ben scritto ovviamente, ma la parte lunghissima relativa allo studio ed alle ricerche sul lytico-bodig(una specie di ALS endemica in alcune isole del Pacifico) ho avuto difficoltà a digerirla, perché senza quella leggerezza divulgativa che caratterizza altri suoi libri, anche se sempre molto leggibile anche da non "addetti ai lavori". Bello ma non vedevo l'ora di finirlo per passare a qualcos'altro di più leggero. I found the Guam part of the book about the lytico-bodig disease pretty too much long and specific, so I looked forward to finishing it and reading something else, although I must say I found a lot of interesting things. I liked much better other books of his like "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat" or "An Anthropologist On Mars"; so, if you haven't read anything by Oliver Sacks and you are not a neurologist, start with these ones instead. ( )

While Sacks is a neurologist, this book reads as an erudite natural history as the author visits a number of Pacific islands to explore isolated pockets of color-blindness and other neurological issues in the inhabitants. His biophilia is evident throughout. ( )

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 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!) ( )