A Primate's Memoir : Love, Death and Baboons in East Africa - Softcover

Sapolsky, Robert M.

4.37

7,936 ratings by Goodreads

9780099285779: A Primate's Memoir : Love, Death and Baboons in East Africa

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099285770 ISBN 13: 9780099285779

Publisher: Vintage Books, 2002

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'I had never planned to become a Savannah baboon when I grew up; instead I assumed I would become a mountain gorilla,' writes Robert Sapolsky in this riveting chronicle of a scientist's coming of age in remote Africa. Upon graduating from college, a booksmart and naive Sapolsky leaves the comforts of the Northeastern United States for the very first time, to join a baboon troop in Kenya as a young transfer male'. An expert in primate behaviour, Sapolsky sets out to study the relationship between stress and disease. As he observes the Machiavellian politics of the troop, giving the primates biblical names and pinpointing his favourite (Benjamin) and his nemesis (Nebuchadnezzar), he also immerses himself in the society of the neighbouring Masai tribesmen and ventures far from his camp on a series of jaw-dropping adventures. Combining irreverence and humour with the best credentials in his field, Sapolsky writes as originally and vividly about people and their society as he does about animals and theirs. "A Primate's Memoir" is the culmination of over two decades of experience and research - an astonishing masterpiece from the unique talent Oliver Sacks has called 'one of the best scientist-writers of our time.'

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Review:

Robert Sapolsky, the author of Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers and other popular books on animal and human behavior, decided early in life to become a primatologist, volunteering at the American Museum of Natural History and badgering his high school principal to let him study Swahili to prepare for travel in Africa. When he set out to conduct fieldwork as a young graduate student, though, Sapolsky found that life among a Kenyan baboon troop was markedly different from his earlier bookish studies. Among other things, he confesses, he had to become a master of shooting anesthetic darts into his subjects with a blowgun to take blood samples, a mastery that required him to become "a leering slinky silent quicksilver baboon terror." He also had to learn how to negotiate the complexities of baboon politics, endure the difficulties of life in the bush, and subsist on cases of canned mackerel and beans.

His memoir is, in the main, quite humorous, although Sapolsky flings a few darts along the way at the late activist Dian Fossey--who, he hints, may have indirectly caused the deaths of her beloved mountain gorillas by her unstable, irrational dealings with local people--and at local bureaucrats whose interests did not often coincide with those of Sapolsky's wild charges. It is also full of good information on primates and primatology, a subject whose practitioners, it seems, are constantly fighting to save species and ecosystems. "Every primatologist I know is losing that battle," he writes. "They make me think of someone whose unlikely job would be to collect snowflakes, to rush into a warm room and observe the unique pattern under a microscope before it melts and is never seen again." --Gregory McNamee

About the Author:

Robert Sapolsky is Professor of Biology and Neurology at Stanford University, and a research associate with the Institute of Primate Research, National Museums of Kenya. He lives in San Francisco.

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