Island of the Colorblind, Oliver Sacks

October – November 2025

This is the 23rd entry in the Essays Project. We continue on our quest to read the complete Sacks oeuvre. Despite its title, this book is divided into two books: The Island of the Colorblind and Cycad Island.

Retrospective on the Book

This was not one of my favorite books, but it was not without interest. It gave interesting glimpses of life in the South Pacific, particularly the hints of how the US military dominates and suppresses freedom in this area of the world. Seems like a remnant of some of the worst of the colonial days. With respect to Sacks’ visits to various islands, the offer interesting accounts, though I have to say it seems to me that he learned little on his visits that he had not already learned from the informants who accompanied him or who he met there.

For me, the high point of the book was the last chapter about his visit to the island of Rota, a little-visited island near Guam. This visit, unlike the others, had no neurological goal: it was simply to see ferns, cycads and the other primitive plants that are dear to Sacks. I like this chapter because it provides some suggestive passages that offer insight on his love of ferns and the allies, which will come to the fore in his Oaxaca Journal. To wit:

The sense of deep time brings a deep peace with it, a detachment from the timescale, the urgencies, of daily life. Seeing these volcanic islands and coral atolls, and wandering, above all, through this cycad forest on Rota, has given me an intimate feeling of the antiquity of the earth, and the slow, continuous processes by which different forms of life evolve and come into being. Standing here in the jungle, I feel part of a larger, calmer identity; I feel a profound sense of being at home, a sort of companionship with the earth.

ibid., 198

Preface

Sacks wrote this book in one swoop, in July of 1995. Subsequently he added voluminous notes, which his editors paired back; this edition appears to have notes that the original one did not.

Sacks writes that his visits to the islands described herein were brief and unexpected, part of no agenda or research program. It does seem that he is pursuing his theme of how individuals (and, in this case, communities) adapt to rare neurological conditions: hereditary colorblindness in the first case, and a fatal neurodegenerative disorder in the second. It also sounds as if his other biological and botanical interests will play into the books.

EP#22: An Anthropologist on Mars, Oliver Sacks

This book seems to focus on people with either acquired or inborn neurodivergences who have adapted to their situations and live, in a sense, in very different worlds from ours.

After reading: yes, this supposition is correct Most are leading successful, if different lives, except for ‘the last hippy’ of chapter 2.

EP#21: Seeing Voices, Oliver Sacks

*Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf, 1989.

August/September 2025

This is, I believe, volume 21 in the Essay’s Project; we are in the process of reading all of Oliver Sacks works. We’ve read much of his work in haphazard order, but after finishing his Letters, we decided to read those books we haven’t read in the order of publication. So far that has been Migraine, A Leg to Stand On, [skipping Awakenings which we’d already read], The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, and now Seeing Voices.

About the book, briefly

This describes Sacks jouney towards understanding Deafness, something he had been hitherto ignorant of. This book — really three separate essays — was written about three years into his inquiry, so, as Sacks notes, he is not writing from a position of expertise. Nevertheless, the book gives a very interesting history of how the Deaf were treated and how their circumstances evolved from being treated as mentally deficient people to non-disabled people who, though they could not hear, used Sign to express themselves, reason, and to develop a unique culture. There is also an account of ASL as a language, and its impact on cognition in those who learn it. It’s a good book, although I think there are probably now better books if what you are interested in is understanding how ASL works.

Preface

Sacks writes that he knew nothing of the Deaf before 1986. It appears that the particular incident that started him on his journey was a request to review the book When the Mind Hears, by Harlan Lane. The request, from Bob Silvers at the New York Review of Books, was accompanied by a note: “You have never really thought about languge; this book will force you to.” Sacks writes (in the first section of the book) that he opened the book with “indifference which soon turned to incredulity.” Over time the review expanded to an essay (the first in this volume) when it appeared in the New York Review of Books in March of 1986. He writes that then Stan Horowitz of the University of California Press immediately responded to the essay and encourage him to turn it into a book. How things unfolded from there is not clear, though he visited Gallaudet later that year. It is clear that, over the three years he worked on the book, he was in dialog with leading researchers, including Ursula Bellugi, Bob Johnson of Gallaudet, and Jerome Brunner.

EP#15: The Making of the American Essay*

*EP#15: The Making of the American Essay, John D. Agata (Graywolf Press, 2016)

Favorites are indicated by ** – there is only one: Blood Burning Moon.
* indicates those that I found something notable in, though I was not keen on them
(*) indicates something previouly read that I still like.
Frankly, I did not care for most of the essays (or, really, most were not essays, but presumably informed or influenced American essayists) in this volume.

This is the 15th volume CT and I have taken up in our essay reading project. Here we return to the type of book we began with — the broadly historical anthology. This differs from previous anthologies we’ve read in that it appears that the editor introduces each piece, something we’ve wished for in the past, especially when we’ve been mystified by why an essay was selected.

Later: Now that we’re farther into it, I’m a little less keen on it. A lot of the material in here are not actually essays: there are short stories, one sermon, a book chapter or two, and some very long pieces (Mark Twain’s A Letter from Earth), none of which strike me as essays. I had hoped for essays, or at least short essay-like pieces… and there are some, but quite a lot is other material. Although his initial introductions were pretty good at situating selections, as the book moves on the introductions are less about the selections, per se, and instead his sort of personal arc through American History. He is also quite fond of experimental work — work that, while it might have raised questions at the time, or contributed to discourse among the literati, is difficult to imagine anyone reading for pleasure or even enlightenment.

EP#14: 2023 Best Science & Nature Writing–Overview

* The Best American Science and Nature Writing of 2023 (ed. Carl Zimmer)

February – March 2024

CT and I selected this book to continue our essay project. However, after reading the first three pieces, we have reconsidered. Although the articles are interesting, they are not what either of would call essays. It’s really journalism, with the focus on ideas. The prose is generally clear and workman like, but as yet we have not encountered any writing that makes us pause to savor the phrase. We intend to look through the book, and — by paying attention to where the piece was originally published – see if we can come up with more essay-like pieces. However, we both suspect, that the book will not past muster vis a vis our project, and that we will move on to something else following our next meeting.

EP #`13: Awakenings, Oliver Sacks

January 2024

Entry 13 in the Essays Project with CT; this is the seventh book we’ve read by Oliver Sacks. This is the book that, with the help of a documentary and then movie, transformed him into something of a celebrity. It is an account of the experience of ‘awakening’ patients with Parkinson’s induced by Encephalitis Lethargia by administering L-Dopa, their experiences of returning to a sort of normal life, and then their declines due to the follow-on negative effects of L-Dopa.

EP#12: The Mind’s Eye, Oliver Sacks

November-December 2023

Entry 12 in the Essays Project with CT; and this is the sixth book we’ve read by Oliver Sacks. Here we take up the neurological case account essays for which he is best known, after reading his two autobiographies, and other writings ranging from general essays to an account of his travels in Oaxaca. This book, published in 2010, explores cases in which people have lost visual abilities that we all take for granted – not so much blindness (although maybe there will be some essays on that), but rather the consequences of some of the many ways in which the complex and intertwined elements of the visual processing system may be disrupted.

EP #11: Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood*, Oliver Sacks, 2001

Entry 11 in the Essays Project with CT; the ‘summer of Sacks’ has turned into the fall of Sacks. It is interesting to be getting such a comprehensive view of a single person’s life and writing. Uncle Tungsten was apparently written in response to the spontaneous surfacing of childhood memories as Sacks approached his 60th year. We’ve read some other essays from that time, mostly from Everything in its Place (essays on South Kensington and Humphry Davies), and found those very good though we hope considerable new ground will be covered. [Later: New ground is being covered — there is not a lot of repetition…]

* Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, Oliver Sacks, 2001.

EP #10*: The River of Consciousness, Oliver Sacks

*The River of Consciousness, Oliver Sacks, 2015.

This is part of the course of essay reading I am doing with CT; in particular, this is part of what we have dubbed ‘The Summer of Sacks.’ According to the introduction, this book was posthumously assembled at Sack’s direction a couple of weeks before his death. One of the catalysts was a televised panel with other notable scientists and scholars — Gould, Dyson, Dennet, etc. — that was later captured in a book called “A Glorious Accident.” This book contains a wide range of essays on scientific topics, with, I suspect, particular attention to history.

EP #9*: On the Move: A Life, Oliver Sacks

*On the Move, Oliver Sacks, 2015.

These are my notes on On the Move, Oliver Sacks autobiography (billed as volume 2, but the publisher, volume 1 being Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, written a couple of decades earlier). This is part of the course of essay reading I am doing with CT; in particular, this is part of what we have dubbed ‘The Summer of Sacks.’ These are not, of course, essays, but we have become interested in Sacks, and it is interesting to see the essays against a fuller narrative of his life.

EP #8*: Oaxaca Journal, Oliver Sacks

Oaxaca Journal, Oliver Sacks, 2019.

These are my notes on Oaxaca Journal, by Oliver Sacks, 2019. This is part 8 of the course of essay reading I am doing with CT; in particular, this is part of what we have dubbed ‘The Summer of Sacks.’ Strictly speaking, these are not essays but rather chapters — or daily entries – from a journal he kept of a trip to Oaxaca, Mexico, with the American Fern Society.

Introduction

Sacks opens by writing of his love of the Natural History journals of the nineteenth century, and their blend of the personal and professional. He notes that most of the naturalists were essentially amateurs, self-taught, and feeling their way before or as biology and botany were crystalizing into sciences. He adds:

This sweet, unspoiled, preprofessional atmosphere, ruled by a sense of adventure and wonder rather than by egotism and a lust for priority and fame, still survives here and there, it seems to me, in certain natural history societies, and amateur societies of astronomers and archaeologists, whose quiet yet essential existences are virtually unknown to the public. It was the sense of such an atmosphere that drew me to the American Fern Society in the first place, that incited me to go with them on their fern-tour to Oaxaca early in 2000.
Oliver Sacks, Oaxaca Journal, p xiv

EP #7* – Everything in Its Place, Oliver Sacks

April – June, 2023

Everything in its Place: First Loves and Last Tales, Oliver Sacks, 2019.

Favorites
Waterbabies, 1997
Remembering South Kensington, 1993
Travels with Lowell, 1988
The Lost Virtues of the Asylum, 2009
Botanists on Park, 2009
Orangutan

EP #5*: Favorites from the Golden Age of the Am. Essay** 1945-1970

2023

Favorites:
An Evening with Jackie Kennedy, Norman Mailer
Writing about Jews, Philip Roth
The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Richard Hofstadter
The Twenty-ninth Republican Convention, Gore Vidal
One Night’s Dying, Loren Eisley

EP #6*: Favorites from the Contemporary American Essay

April-May 2023

Thomas Beller, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Bagel, 2005
Aleksandar Hemon, The Aquarium, 2013
Leslie Jamieson, The Empathy Exams, 2013
Karen Russell, Beeper World, 2014
John McPhee, Draft #4, 2017
Floyd Skloot, Gray Areas: Thinking with a Damaged Brain, 2003

* Part 6 of the Essays Project: A course of reading conducted with Charles Taliaferro. Note that these are my particular favorites and views, not CT’s, though no doubt some are influenced by him.

** The Contemporary American Essay, edited by Philip Lopate

EP #4*: Five Essays by Chesterton

Thursday, 6 October 2022

* Part 4 of the Essays Project: A course of reading conducted with Charles Taliaferro. Note that these are my particular favorites and views, not CT’s, though no doubt some are influenced by him.

This entry contains thoughts on five essays by Chesterton:

A Defense of Rash Vows
A Piece of Chalk
On Lying in Bed
Dreams
On the Thrills of Boredom

EP #3*: Favorites from Best American Essays of the 20thC

Thursday, 25 August 2022

My favorites from the Best American Essays of the 20th Century:
The Brown Wasps, Loren Eisley – 1956
Perfect Past, Vladimir Nabokov – 1966
Stickeen, John Muir – 1909
The Search for Marvin Gardens, John McPhee – 1972
Total Eclipse, Annie Dillard – 1982

And essays which weren’t quite favorites, but which I found instructive:
Pamplona in July, Ernest Hemingway, 1923
Putting Daddy On, Tom Wolfe, 1964
The White Album, Joan Didion, 1970

EP #2*: Favorites from Best Am. Essays of 2020

Friday, 27 August 2022

Favorites:
A Street of Splendid Strangers, Leslie Jamison
Driving as a Metaphor, Rachel Cusk
How to Bartend, Rabih Alameddine

EP #2: Best Am. Essays of 2020 – First look…

Wednesday 9 March 2022

It’s a cold day, in the teens, with a some faint wisps of cirrus clouds in a whitish blue sky. As the temperatures have fallen over the past few days, puddles have solidified, breeding long spear-like ice crystals. There are ice crystals in the sky as well — they make up the Cirrus clouds and distinguish them from most other types of clouds which are made of water droplets. Cirrus clouds occur during fair weather, which this is; they sometimes herald warm fronts, but not this time.

I have just come from my weekly meeting with CT, where we discussed essays. We have finished the Oxford Book of Essays, and embarked on a new book: The Best American Essays, 2020. After the Oxford book, whose most recent essay was authored in 1984, we wanted to get a sense of the state of the art. For this session, we read the Foreward, Introduction, and first three essays of BAE2020.

EP #1*: Ten Favorites from The Oxford Book of Essays**

February 27, 2022

Favorites:
The Haunted Mind, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1835
The Acorn-Gatherer, Richard Jefferies, 1884
Cordova, Arthur Symons, 1898
A Clergyman, Sir Max Beerbohm, 1918
The Death of the Moth, Virginia Woolf, 1925
Insouciance, 1928, D H Lawrence
The Toy Farm, J. B. Priestly, 1927
The Snout, Loren Eisley, 1957
The Crisp at the Crossroads, Reyner Banham, 1970
La Paz, Jan Morris, 1963