SOURCE: Hanlon, David. Review of The Island of the Colorblind and Cycad Island, by Oliver Sacks. Contemporary Pacific 11, no. 1 (spring 1999): 270.

In the following review, Hanlon argues that “despite the charm of much of its narrative and the fluidity of its prose, Island of the Colorblind remains little more than another travel account of life in the Pacific that reduces indigenous peoples to the category of observed and controlled subjects.”

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 [The Island of the Colorblind]. 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...