Oaxaca Journal

#659
Title: Oaxaca Journal
Author: Oliver Sacks
Publisher: National Geographic
Year: 1999/2005
160 pages
Audiobook


I  know this wouldn't be to everyone's taste, but it's absolutely to mine, because

1. I have great affection for shy, awkward men who are brimming with ideas and have few social skills.
2. I admire the scientific storytelling tradition that includes data, natural history, contextualizing narrative, and self-reflective commentary.
3. I have an amateur's fondness for taxonomy and categorization, and though ultimately I don't care what's being ordered or arranged, I have a preference for plants and animals.
4. I admire Sacks's associational tangle, and his ability to articulate it.

This small book exemplifies the style of not quite x, but not anything else, either that I so enjoy; in this way, it is genre-bending. No thought stands on its own; images, ideas, smells, aches, words, cultural referents, are all madeleines. This is true not just for Sacks, but for me as well. More than anything I've read recently, this journal of a fern-hunting trip to Oaxaca makes me wish I were engaged in conceptual mapping. One way to do this would be to have a copy of this text and be able to add hyperlinks to other texts, then display the links as a rotating, color-coded, 3-dimensional image. If this notion appeals to you, you may well like this molcajete--a little autobiography, a little pre-Columbian history, a little zocalo-watching, a little neurology, and a good handful of ferns and worts, though not as many as one would find in a book solely dedicated to the ferniness of the ferning. If you ever feel the almost painful sweetness of momentarily connecting with the hidden world of nerds who, though not quite the same as you, still understand you, pick up a copy of this charming account.