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Island hopping with Oliver Sacks, renowned neurologist -- or neuroanthropologist, as he calls himself -- is an adventure extraordinaire. In The Island of the Colorblind, Sacks takes us on a trip to Pingelap, a tiny Pacific atoll with a disproportionally large community of people who cannot see color at all, and then to Guam, to investigate a Parkinson-like disease very reminiscent of the affliction he described in Awakenings.
Sacks is intrigued with "brilliantly adaptable life forms," with the adaptations the human mind and body must make in order to cope with severe, often strange, sensory impairment. A lifelong lover of botany, he is equally intrigued with the cycads, "brilliantly adaptable" primitive trees, he finds on the islands and is as eloquent on the slow process of evolution as he is on the effects of Parkinsonism.
Dr. Sacks has the wonderful gift of making his scientific inquiries accessible and exciting, and hearing him read is an added pleasure.
Sukey Howard reports on spoken word audio each month. Don't miss her audio book reviews on CNN's Sunday Morning.
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