“Back to individuals and their stories again–now explored at a length, and with a depth, beyond that of Hat, though some of the themes–autism, amnesia, Tourette’s syndrome, etc. were the same.” — Oliver Sacks

Neurological patients, Oliver Sacks has written, are travellers to unimaginable lands. An Anthropologist on Mars offers portraits of seven such travellers– including a surgeon consumed by the compulsive tics of Tourette’s Syndrome except when he is operating; an artist who loses all sense of color in a car accident, but finds a new sensibility and creative power in black and white; and an autistic professor who has great difficulty deciphering the simplest social exchange between humans, but has built a career out of her intuitive understanding of animal behavior.

These are paradoxical tales, for neurological disease can conduct one to other modes of being that–however abnormal they may be to our way of thinking–may develop virtues and beauties of their own. The exploration of these individual lives is not one that can be made in a consulting room or office, and Dr. Sacks has taken off his white coat and deserted the hospital, by and large, to join his subjects in their own environments. He feels, he says, in part like a neuroanthropologist, but most of all like a physician, called here and there to make house calls, house calls at the far borders of experience.

Along the way, he gives us a new perspective on the way our brains construct our individual worlds. In his lucid and compelling reconstructions of the mental acts we take for granted–the act of seeing, the transport of memory, the notion of color–Oliver Sacks provokes anew a sense of wonder at who we are.

“Here, as in Seeing Voices, I was concerned not only with individuals, but with whole populations; thus, I felt as much an anthropologist as a doctor when seeing the impact on the chammoros of a terrible neurodegenerative disease in Guam, and of a hereditory total color-blindness in the tiny coral atol of Pingelap. But these two little books often broke away from the purely medical, and became journals of travel and enchantment in the tropical islands.” —Oliver Sacks

Oliver Sacks has always been fascinated by islands–their remoteness, their mystery, above all the unique forms of life they harbor. For him, islands conjure up equally the romance of Melville and Stevenson, the adventure of Magellan and Cook, and the scientific wonder of Darwin and Wallace.

Drawn to the tiny Pacific atoll of Pingelap by intriguing reports of an isolated community of islanders born totally colorblind, Dr. Sacks finds himself setting up a clinic in a one-room island dispensary, where he listens to these achromatopic islanders describe their colorless world in rich terms of pattern and tone, luminance and shadow. And on Guam, where he goes to investigate the puzzling neurodegenerative 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.

The islands reawaken Sacks’ lifelong passion for botany–in particular, for the primitive cycad trees, whose existence dates back to the Paleozoic–and the cycads are the starting point for an intensely personal reflection on the meaning of islands, the dissemination of species, the genesis of disease, and the nature of deep geologic time. Out of an unexpected journey, Sacks has woven an unforgettable narrative which immerses us in the romance of island life, and shares his own compelling vision of the complexities of being human.