A Primate's Memoir: A Neuroscientist's Unconventional Life Among the Baboons
by Robert M. Sapolsky

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Book Reviews of A Primate's Memoir: A Neuroscientist's Unconventional Life Among the Baboons

Book Review: Very funny, absorbing, and fascinating account
Summary: 5 Stars

At times, however, it's more like the baboons who are getting to study the young human's response to stress, as Sapolsky is forced to eat nothing but canned mackerel in tomato sauce, rice, and beans for months at a time, hordes of wild animals like wildebeests trample and crap over everything in camp during the migration season, and even the local elephants take to invading the camp and eating the roof and walls of his hut. He has a seemingly never-ending stream of erratic and unreliable camp assistants, and the one other western scientist in the area, was, as Sapolsky puts it, as feral an example of the unwashed and unhousebroken species of field biologist as he had ever seen.

Some of these images will stay with me for life, such as the time that he was ill with diarrhea and had to answer the call just as a troop of elephants decided to visit his camp, quizzically but stoically watching the miserable young scientist doing his duty as they ate the branches and leaves of his lean-to which he had only just built. Actually, it was his Kenyan camp assistant that had built it, who went crazy shortly thereafter when his attempt to dam the upper part of the river with a mud dam came to naught. But that's another story.

Then there's the time he encountered a couple of Masai tribesman, his only real neighbors, who wanted to know how he was tranquilizing the baboons he was studying. Sapolsky explained it was with a tranquilizer dart, and that the drug would work on a human too. No way, said the Masai, a baboon and human are totally different. Sure, says Sapolsky, we're very similar. In fact, we came from them and used to have tails just like them. No way, say the Masai, who are getting more agitated. Yes, insists Sapolsky, in fact you could have a baboon heart. Now the two Masai are really upset and are brandishing their spears in his face, after which point Sapolsky stopped arguing the point with the Masai "fundamentalists" and everything calmed down.

There is a dark side to Sapolsky's memoirs too as he recounts his visit to Uganda which occurred during the Tanzanian/Ugandan war, when it wasn't safe to travel through much of the countryside, but Sapolsky was determined to see some of the sights there, and one night the part of town he was in got shelled by Amin's army and he and the driver of the truck he'd hitched a ride with spent the night huddled under the truck for protection. During a failed coup, he was beaten at an army checkpoint and witnessed street violence in Nairobi. And he had many sad as well as funny stories to tell about the hapless Kenyans, mostly young men from the local maize farms who came and went as his camp assistants, who seemed less happy about the rigors of a bush camp life than Sapolsky himself.

But the book isn't all about the funny and sad stories of us (presumably) more evolved humans. Sapolsky gives much interesting and detailed information about the lives of the baboon troop he studied, especially their mating and dominance rituals and interactions, which aren't so different from us humans in many ways. The most aggressive and determined individuals rise to the top of baboon society. The females want to mate only with them. Sound like a familiar pattern? :-)

Anyway, there are dozens of other funny and entertaining stories in this book. Sapolsky writes well, and we often see the absurdities and complexities of our more advanced culture reflected in the simplicity and naivete of local tribal life.

I just had one minor nitpick. Although this is a trade-sized paperback, the print on the page is still a little small and even then the book is 300 pages long. They needed to make the font about 25% larger but obviously they were trying to keep the book from being 400 pages long because of the extra expense.

Overall, this is a very funny, entertaining, and interesting account, and without a doubt is the funniest scientific memoir I've ever read.

Summary of A Primate's Memoir: A Neuroscientist's Unconventional Life Among the Baboons

An exhilarating account of Sapolsky's twenty-one-year study of a troop of rambunctious baboons in Kenya, A Primate's Memoir interweaves serious scientific observations with wry commentary about the challenges and pleasures of living in the wilds of the Serengeti -- for man and beast alike. Over two decades, Sapolsky survives culinary atrocities, gunpoint encounters, and a surreal kidnapping, while witnessing the encroachment of the tourist mentality on the farthest vestiges of unspoiled Africa. As he conducts unprecedented physiological research on wild primates, he becomes evermore enamored of his subjects -- unique and compelling characters in their own right -- and he returns to them summer after summer, until tragedy finally prevents him.

By turns hilarious and poignant, A Primate's Memoir is a magnum opus from one of our foremost science writers.

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

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• Subjects > Biographies & Memoirs > Memoirs
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• Science & Math > Biological Sciences > Animals > Apes & Monkeys
• Travel > Africa