Drawn to the tiny Pacific atoll of Pingelap by intriguing reports of an isolated
community of islanders born totally color-blind, Sacks finds himself setting up
a clinic in a one-room island dispensary, where he listens to these achromatopi
c islanders describe their colorless world in rich terms of pattern and tone, lu
minance and shadow. And on Guam, where he goes to investigate the puzzling neuro
degenerative paralysis endemic there for a century, he becomes, for a brief time
, an island neurologist, making house calls with his colleague John Steele, amid
crowing cockerels, cycad jungles, and the remains of a colonial culture.
