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The Island of the Colorblind and Cycad Island, by Oliver Sacks. New York: Alfred A Knopf, I997. ISBN o-679-45II4-5, xv + zg8 pages. Maps, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth, us$z4.
Oliver Sacks, professor of neurology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and author of several popularly acclaimed books, has written an account of his travels to Micronesia. He describes his book as a "very personal, idiosyncratic, perhaps eccentric view of the islands, informed in part by a lifelong romance with islands and island botany" (xii). It certainly is that. Sacks recounts two trips to the region, though the exact dates of these journeys remain unclear. The first, to Pingelap via Pohnpei, both islands being in the Eastern Caroline group, appears to have taken place in late I993; the second trip, to Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands, may have occurred in I994. Confusion over the exact location in time of these trips is of lesser concern, however, than the intellectual, literary, and colonial genealogies informing Sacks' narrative and his representations of various Micronesian peoples.
Lifelong interests in islands, island botany, and neurological disorders provide the immediate motivation behind the trips. Sacks visits Pingelap to observe a community among whose members exists an unusually large percentage of people suffering from congenital color blindness or achromatopsia. Man of science that he is, Sacks wonders what kinds of heightened and compensatory sensitivities achromatopic people develop in lieu of color. His interest in Guam centers on a neurological disease endemic to the island and called by the Chamorro people lytico-bodig. The disease manifests itself in two forms. There is sometimes lytico, a progressive physical paralysis resembling the motor neuron disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. On other occasions, there develops bodig, a degenerative disease similar to parkinsonism and sometimes accompanied by dementia.
In the early I950s, Io percent of all adult Chamorro deaths were attributed to lytico-bodig; the prevalence of the disease in this period was one hundred times greater on Guam than on the North American mainland. In some areas of Guam, specifically the village of Umatac, the incidence of the disease was four...