The Island of the Colorblind

Zusatztext "Magical . . . Sacks's fans are in for a treat." --Kirkus "An explorer of that most wonderous of islands! the human brain!"  writes D.M. Thomas in The New York Times Book Review! "Oliver Sacks also loves the oceanic kind of islands."  Both kinds figure movingly in this book--part travelogue! part autobiography! part medical mystery story--in which Sacks's journeys to a tiny Pacific atoll and the island of Guam become explorations of the time! and the complexities of being human. "Sacks's total immersion in islands life makes this luminous! beautifully written report a wonderous voyage of discovery. As a travel writer! Sacks ranks with Paul Theroux and Bruce Chatwin. As an investigator of the mind's mysteries! he is in a class by himself." --Publishers Weekly Informationen zum Autor Oliver Sacks was a neurologist, writer, and professor of medicine. Born in London in 1933, he moved to New York City in 1965, where he launched his medical career and began writing case studies of his patients. Called the “poet laureate of medicine” by The New York Times , Sacks is the author of thirteen books, including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,   Musicophilia , and  Awakenings , which inspired an Oscar-nominated film and a play by Harold Pinter. He was the recipient of many awards and honorary degrees, and was made a Commander of the British Empire in 2008 for services to medicine. He died in 2015. Klappentext "An explorer of that most wondrous of islands, the human brain," writes D.M. Thomas in The New York Times Book Review , "Oliver Sacks also loves the oceanic kind of islands." Both kinds figure movingly in this book--part travelogue, part autobiography, part medical mystery story--in which Sacks's journeys to a tiny Pacific atoll and the island of Guam become explorations of the meaning of islands, the genesis of disease, the wonders of botany, the nature of deep geological time, and the complexities of being human. Leseprobe Islands have always fascinated me; perhaps they fascinate everyone. The first summer holiday I remember -- I was just three years old -- was a visit to the Isle of Wight. There are only fragments in memory -- the cliffs of many-colored sands, the wonder of the sea, which I was seeing for the first time: it's calmness, its gentle swell, its warmth, entranced me; its roughness, when the wind rose, terrified me. My father told me that he had won a race swimming round the Isle of Wight before I was born, and this made me think of him as a giant, a hero. Stories of islands, and seas, and ships and mariners entered my consciousness very early -- my mother would tell me about Captain Cook, about Magellan and Tasman and Dampier and Bougainville, and all the islands and peoples they had discovered, and she would point them out to me on the globe. Islands were special places, remote and mysterious, intensely attractive, yet frightening too. I remember being terrified by a children's encyclopedia with a picture of the great blind statues of Easter Island looking out to sea, as I read that the Islanders had lost the power to sail away from the island and were totally cut off from the rest on humanity, doomed to die in utter isolation. I read about castaways, desert islands, prison islands, leper islands. I adored The Lost World , Conan Doyle's splendid yarn about an isolated South American plateau full of dinosaurs and Jurassic lifeforms -- in effect, an island marooned in time (I knew the book virtually by heart, and dreamed of growing up to be another Professor Challenger.) I was very impressionable and readily made other people's imaginings my own. H.G. Wells was particularly potent--all desert islands, for me, became his Aepyornis Island or, in a nightmare mode, the island of Dr. Moreau. Later, when I came to read Herman Melville and Robert Louis Stevenson, the real and th...

Produktdetails

• Autoren: Oliver Sacks, Oliver W. Sacks
• Verlag: Vintage USA
• Sprache: Englisch
• Produktform: Taschenbuch
• Erschienen: 12.01.1998
• EAN: 9780375700736
• ISBN: 978-0-375-70073-6
• Seiten: 336
• Abmessung: 130 mm x 203 mm x 18 mm
• Serie: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Thema: Ratgeber > Gesundheit