If your experience with medical non-fiction is limited to disease-of-the-week books, meet Oliver Sacks. A neurologist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Sacks has written seven great books on the wonders of our minds' structure and functioning, including the classic The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat. In The Island Of The Colorblind, Sacks travels to the small Pacific island of Pingelap to investigate a community of achromats, people who are born colorblind. His reports of these people and their richly tonal and textural perceptions of the world aren't doctors' diagnoses of a horrible handicap; because they're colorblind from birth, the Pingalapese have no conception of what they are missing. Sacks chooses instead to give the reader some idea of their vision of the world, and to show how an achromatic culture reacts to its environment. Sacks loves learning, and that's the joy and framing structure of this book; unlike many science writers, medical authors included, Sacks is careful to keep sight of the human element and its interactions with the world—sometimes in the background, but always of primary importance. The Island Of The Colorblind is a rare romantic look, not only at island culture, but at the mechanisms of the human brain.