The Island of the Colour-blind

This is a wonderful book, made better by Sacks‘ exceptionally gentle descriptions of patients. He also captures the unimaginable sadness of the Pacific * The Spectator *
There is no one at the present time who writes like Oliver Sacks … [Sacks] writes of disease and disability with profound empathy and impressive erudition. He is a superb clinician who can take a seemingly arid and obscure medical condition, and convert it into a moving, personal odyssey, a testament of tenacity, courage and will * Literary Review *
Dr Sacks is an elegant and beguiling writer, and when he describes a condition such as achromatopsia (total colour-blindness), he is not content merely to describe it from the outside, but he tries to imagine what the world is like to a person with the condition * The Sunday Telegraph *
Sacks is rightly renowned for his empathy … anyone with a taste for the exotic will find this beautifully written book highly engaging * The Sunday Times *
Sacks’s fans are in for a treat: This is a magical medical mystery tour of South Sea islands that goes beyond the neurological lore to reveal the good doctor as historian, botanist, environmentalist, anthropologist, and, as always, caring human being * Kirkus *
Remarkable … powerful … constantly engaging * Irish Journal of Psychological Medicine *

Oliver Sacks was born in 1933 in London, England. Both of his parents were physicians. He earned his medical degree at Queen’s College, Oxford. In the early 1960s, he moved to the United States and completed an internship in San Francisco and a residency in neurology at UCLA. Since 1965, he has lived in New York, where he is clinical professor of neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, adjunct professor of neurology at the NYU School of Medicine, and consultant neurologist to the Little Sisters of the Poor.

In 1966, Dr. Sacks began working as a consulting neurologist for Beth Abraham Hospital, a chronic care facility in the Bronx. There, he encountered a group of patients who had survived the great pandemic of sleepy sickness (encephalitis lethargica) that swept the world from 1916 to 1927. Many of these patients had spent decades in strange, frozen states, unable to initiate movement. Dr. Sacks treated them with a then-experimental drug, L-dopa, which enabled them to “come back to life.” These patients became the subjects of his second book, Awakenings (1973), which later inspired a play by Harold Pinter (A Kind of Alaska) and the Oscar-nominated Hollywood movie Awakenings, starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams.

He is the author of A Leg to Stand On, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Seeing Voices, Migraine, An Anthropologist on Mars, Neurology of the Soul, The Island of the Colourblind, and most recently, Uncle Tungsten.

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