Oaxaca Journal (National Geographic Directions)

Thanks for taking me along as a stow-away. I can't wait to share this book with my reading group.


Mispickel! Orpiment! Realgar!   September 15, 2005
E. A. Lovitt (Gladwin, MI USA)
13 out of 13 found this review helpful

Dr. Sacks accompanied a group of botanical friends on a trip to see, catalogue, draw, and take delight in the unparalleled variety of ferns in Oaxaca, Mexico. His resulting journal is a meditation on Zapotec culture, amateur naturalists, edible insects, psychedelics, and above all ferns: seemingly so fragile yet having survived, with little change, for over 300 million years.

According to the author, his "sense of a prehistoric world, of immense spans of time, was first stimulated by ferns and fossil ferns."

For someone like myself who loves both ferns and the writings of Dr. Sacks, this journal is a treasure. It was composed under the blue sky of Oaxaca and filled with an emotion that Dr. Sacks admits is usually foreign to him: joy.

The author is fond of reading natural history journals and he has created a multi-faceted gem of his own, out of observations on lost civilizations, mescal, cochineal insects, plants as rare as horsetails a hundred feet high, and others as common as the bracken fern.

Half of our property in Michigan is covered with bracken ferns and I was always curious as to why insects didn't seem to bother them. According to this author, bracken is regarded as the 'Lucrezia Borgia' of the fern world: "the young fronds release hydrogen cyanide as soon as the insect's mandible tears into them, and if this does not kill or deter the bug, a much crueler poison lies in store. Brackens, more than any other plants, are loaded with hormones called ecdysones, and when these are ingested by insects, they cause uncontrollable molting."

The Romans used bracken on their stable floors because it arrested or perverted the development of fly larvae, although Dr. Sacks doesn't specify how the ancients kept the horses from eating their bedding. Bracken also poisons mammals, and humans who eat too many fiddle-heads over a long period of time are apt to develop stomach cancer.

It is tempting to open up "Oaxaca Journal" and reread an essay equally as vivid as the riff on the 'Lucrezia Borgia of ferns.' There are so many choices. By writing a journal for the National Geographic 'Literary Travel Series,' Dr. Sacks has opened himself up to every conceivable subject under the blazing Mexican sun.

There is indeed joy in this book.



Interesting and charming! If you've never thought of visiting Oaxaca ('cause it's not on the coast), maybe now you will!   June 27, 2005
J. Ojard (Minneapolis, MN USA)
9 out of 9 found this review helpful

This is a book for Oaxaca lovers and people who could BECOME Oaxaca lovers at the slightest provocation. Oliver Sacks, rummaging around in the history, natural history, geography, geology, anthropology and cuisine of this best-loved part of Mexico, and recording his thoughts, has answered many questions I have had about the place. Just for one example, through reading his book, I discovered that El Tule, the gigantic tree outside of town that everyone visits sooner or later, is a bald cypress and is probably at least 3000 years old. Neither fact is really clear from the information available at the site, perhaps losing something in translation. But the book is filled with such tidbits, and that's not all. Sacks and his fern-loving companions find a lot to enjoy in this old, stucco-walled, stone-paved city and the surrounding countryside. Some books make me wonder (and fear!) what the world is coming to. This book proclaims that all is not lost, since it focuses on things that have always brought hope to mankind, and perhaps represent our ultimate hope: the wonderful natural world and the many GOOD dimensions of the human mind...the many good humans. When a group of such people, intelligent, interested, interestING, and curious--as one reviewer said, exactly the kind of traveling companions one would like!--will take time from their lives and trek all the way to Oaxaca to look at ferns, the world becomes a better place, even if no one else knows about it. Thanks to Mr. Sacks, we do.


An unedited journal, straight from the heart   February 13, 2007
Luis P. Fernandez (Cambridge, MA)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful

After finishing this book, I am convinced that people who develop a passion for something, be it for career, avocation, or hobby, tend to live longer and are more frequently happy, and when they die, they die happy. I bet Oliver Sacks is one of these lucky people! Never cease to be fascinated--that is one key to happiness, and Sacks proves to us just that. Without question he is a Renaissance man, keen to share with us his enthusiasm for his profession (evident from his excellent prose in "The man who mistook..." and his other books) but stays open to ideas and activities that pique his interest, one of which is attending and participating in the New York Botanical Garden's Fern Society and embarking on a weeklong trip to Oaxaca, Mexico with a quirky cast of people whose common interest in ferns and other plants, and birds, transcend professions, economic status, nationality, and personal histories. The fact that the book was based on his travel journals that were written at the time of his trip and were left unedited made the reading experience more poignant and powerful. At the end you feel grateful for people who look "beyond the scenery", who take the time "to stop and smell the flowers", and who see the world almost with the same innocence as children, for they are the ones that make life richer, and perhaps even make the world a better place for the rest of us--and for future generations.


If You Have an Affection for Ferns...   July 2, 2009
Giordano Bruno (Wherever I am, I am.)
... or for the wonderful Mexican city Oaxaca, or if you're planning a trip there, or if you know already that you enjoy the writings of Oliver Sacks, then I have no doubt at all that you'll relish this 150-page excursion into science, history, plazas, and the assorted reflections of a 66-year-old traveler. Otherwise, you might not find the focus or detect the tenor of Sacks's "Journal". The author declares in his preface that the book is a scarcely revised selection of pages from the journal he kept as part of an excursion by members of the American Fern Society to the city and state of Oaxaca in southern Mexico, a region that stretches across rain forests, cloud forests, deserts, and densely populated farmlands, and that supports an amazing variety of ferns and other 'primitive' plants. The other members of the AFS party were each and all fascinating personages, whom Sacks portrays with relish. All I can say is that I wish I'd been there, and you will also, after reading this book.

A quick read, the sort of book you might take on a long flight! Sacks's cogitations on the subject of co-evolution are especially stimulating, and of course the frightful ecological prospects for regions of immense diversity, like Oaxaca, in the next few decades of global warming and pollution are not unmentioned.