Volume 44, Number 4 · March 6, 1997
Outcasts of the Islands
By Jared Diamond
The Island of the Colorblind
by Oliver Sacks
Knopf, 298 pp., $24.00
In 1964, while studying bird evolution on the tropical Pacific island of New Guinea, I happened to set up camp among a tribe known as the Fore. I soon found my attention drawn away from birds to a human tragedy unfolding around me. Many of the tribespeople, children as well as adults, were limping on crutches, or unable to control their facial muscles, or lying semi-paralyzed in their huts. When I asked what was wrong, their healthy relatives answered with the single word 'kuru,' as if no more explanation were needed. Kuru, the Fore way of death, is now internationally notorious as a neurological disease, always fatal, and confined to that one tribe living in a group of mountain valleys only a few hundred square miles in extent.
Review, 5454 words
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