The Island of the Colorblind and Cycad Island (Magill’s Literary Annual 1998)
At a glance:
- Author: Oliver Sacks
- First Published: 1997
- Type of Work: Essays and science
- Setting: Micronesia and the Caroline Islands
- Principal Characters: Oliver Sacks, Knut Norby, Robert Wasserman, John Steele, Beata Mendiola
- Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, Science and technology
- Subjects: Blindness or blind persons, Science or scientists, Islands, Diseases, Botany or botanists, Brain, Vision
- Locales: Micronesia, Caroline Islands
Readers who are familiar with Oliver Sacks’s earlier works will find familiar echoes of each of them in this new volume of casually related essays. Sacks, the unconventional, humanistic neurologist of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985) and Awakenings (1973), has chosen to examine the rare and exotic condition of the congenitally color-blind community on the islands of Pingelap and Pohnpei in Micronesia, in addition to studying the high incidence of lytico-bodig, a many-symptomed disease common among the Chamoffos, which mysteriously disappeared from Guam in...
[The entire page is 1809 words long]
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