Two fascinating neurobiological-epidemiological mysteries. Sacks is a bit slow to read, but his tone is so charming and the intregue so great it's worth it.

3.5

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.

30 Words Review

Oliver Sacks mixes together the curiosity of a child and the knowledge of the world's best neurologists, botanists and explorers in this vivid travel log of the Pacific Ocean's Islands.

I love Oliver Sacks' books. This one was about his travels to various island/island groups to study interesting medical conditions occurring in higher numbers than in other places. His books are always fascinating and are easy to read even though their non-fiction and typically deal with medical conditions. They are more like a sympathetic narrative of his patients than a medical journal. He travels to island were there is a large number of colorblind people. And another where people are affected by a rare parkinsons-like disease (to reduce it way more than is fair). I didn't realize that the footnotes were pretty much a whole nother book and admit I didn't read them as I was going along. I didn't see them until the end!

I enjoyed this mixture of science and travel writing, and was intrigued by the affliction of total colour blindness: it would be interesting to know more about the linguistic consequences of this way of perceiving the world. While I felt Sack's style remained accessible even while describing the intricacies of different diseases and varieties of cycad I didn't think he was as powerful or engrossing as when writing a briefer case study. Even so, I wish I had seen the television series.

"The Eden of lost childhood, childhood imagined, became transformed by some legerdemain of the unconscious to an Eden of the remote past, a magical 'once,' rendered wholly benign by the omission, the editing out, of all change."