Rating: 
Summary: A Primate's Memoir
Review: A kid who "always thought he would grow up to be a mountain gorilla but had to settle for being a baboon," Sapolsky has created an interesting life for himself that he shares with us in this delightful memoir.I laughed out loud while reading this book -- so many times that I gave away copies for Christmas! Sapolsky manages, with dry humor and a scientist's eye, to capture his twenty years of baboon observation so well that the reader learns about baboons, the Masai, Kenya, political maneuvering and scientific studies, while enjoying a good story. The action moves along easily as we become familiar with his baboon troupe and follow the individual characters' actions throughout the book. As a layperson, I learned a lot about long-term biological behavior study while I was getting to know Sapolsky's take on the world. A joy to read.
Rating:
Summary: A Primate's Memoir
Review: A kid who "always thought he would grow up to be a mountain gorilla but had to settle for being a baboon," Sapolsky has created an interesting life for himself that he shares with us in this delightful memoir. I laughed out loud while reading this book -- so many times that I gave away copies for Christmas! Sapolsky manages, with dry humor and a scientist's eye, to capture his twenty years of baboon observation so well that the reader learns about baboons, the Masai, Kenya, political maneuvering and scientific studies, while enjoying a good story. The action moves along easily as we become familiar with his baboon troupe and follow the individual characters' actions throughout the book. As a layperson, I learned a lot about long-term biological behavior study while I was getting to know Sapolsky's take on the world. A joy to read.
Rating:
Summary: A Primate's Memoir
Review: A rollicking,enthralling, insightful life's adventure
told by a wonderful scientist who is also incredibly comfortable in a literary skin. To date, I have given eight copies away to friends who have given it to their friends. This is the kind of book you are really sorry to finish;I only let myself read one chapter each night so I could stretch it out as long as possible!
Rating:
Summary: A Primate's Memoir
Review: A rollicking,enthralling, insightful life's adventure
told by a wonderful scientist who is also incredibly comfortable in a literary skin. To date, I have given eight copies away to friends who have given it to their friends. This is the kind of book you are really sorry to finish;I only let myself read one chapter each night so I could stretch it out as long as possible!
Rating: 
Summary: thanks to a tribe of baboons, colonialism can live on
Review: Am I the only one who can't help the feeling that this author is, with all good intentions, living a traditional colonial scientist fantasy, and that his relationship to animals and the baboons could stand a little critical scrutiny? Once you get past the overly-full-of-himself funny bits, there are lots of descriptions of Africans that consistently have the ring of "geez, these backward people are soo funny!" When scientists from Nairobi come to work with Sapolsky on a TB outbreak, they aren't described as excellent scientists, they are helpmates, assisting the great bwana in his quest. The author talks about how he loves his baboons, but he has a traditional scientific subject/object relationship with them: he anaesthetizes them, then takes blood samples. When working at his lab in the US, his research causes the death and suffering of many animals for the cause of medicine. I find the author's ethics and positioning towards African people and animals questionable. Not to condemn, but please -- I miss a critical angle in the reviews that are already here.
Rating:
Summary: Baboon bon mots
Review: Anyone who begins a book by telling us that he "had never planned to become a savanna baboon when [he] grew up" deserves a read. Such an opening promises witticisms and wisdom and A PRIMATE'S MEMOIR doesn't disappoint. The story is captivating whether Mr Sapolsky is telling us about his experiences in Kenya or about the interesting life of...his extended family? The book is only part scientific study: the effect that stress has on primate social behavior; it is also a travelogue, a little bit of cultural anthropology, a comment on globalization and economic inequality, a memoir of course, and finally, a pure joy to read. Although it is now widely known that stress affects health, Mr Sapolsky's work has shown that this differs among individuals. He has also exploded the myth of the supremacy of the alpha male in primate groups. Among the baboons he shows complex social arrangements where important leadership functions are carried out by senior females; and what else but a complex social order would show - as his troop did - that lower ranking males suffer higher stress levels and greater ill health? After twenty years of on and off study Mr Sapolsky has naturally grown fond of the baboons. He gives them Old Testament names not from affection, but simply because they exhibit individual personalities. The King of the troop is naturally Solomon and Nebuchanezzar is a vengeful, attacking female. The book is never sappy and does not romanticize the beasts and that is good - because wild animals they certainly are. A troop is an appropriate name for a group of baboons. Perhaps squad could work also because when approaching an unknown there is an element of military purposefulness and discipline about their behavior. As a 10 year old in Kenya in the sixties, I was stranded with my uncle in his car on the side of the road from Mombasa to Nairobi. While we waited baboons approached: there was the dominant male as point man - up front to get our attention; there were flankers on the sides, circling; and sure enough there were commandos coming up from the rear, behind the car. I can fully appreciate Mr Sapolsky's comment on their intelligence when he says: "you find yourself, a reasonably well-educated human with a variety of interests, spending hours each day and night obsessing on how to outmaneuver these beasts, how to think like them, how to think better than them. Usually unsuccessfully." The depradations of bush life, the difficulties that he occasionally got into, and the intruding, harsh reality of life in the Third World are all addressed by Mr Sapolsky is an honest and yet very humorous way. Overall, above and beyond science and the odd difficulty, A PRIMATE'S MEMOIR portrays a wonderful joi de vivre that both Mr Sapolsky and his baboons seem to have enjoyed most of the time.
Rating:
Summary: great book, lab rats and all!
Review: As much about Africa, adventure and human nature as about baboons, A Primate's Memoir is a hilarious, sad, thrilling and informative book suitable for all sorts of readers.
I really have to disagree with Chris Lemoine's two-star rating of this book (on Amazon). Chris describes Sapolsky's humorous descriptions of interactions with various people in Africa as demeaning, as poking fun at how "backwards" these other cultures seem. I see it quite differently - Sapolsky seems to laugh not at the PEOPLE but at the DIFFERENCES between various people and cultures - he views the Masai, New Yorkers, the British, the baboons and himself all with the same critical/humorous eye (ok, well... he does give the British a particularly hard time). He manages also to hint at how SIMILAR we all are in grand scheme of things. This is precisely what makes the book so special, so worth reading.
Yes, as Chris ponts out - Sapolsky tortures rats in labs. And yes, I have problems with such things. But the book is not about rats, or labs, or the glorification of animal experimentation....see The Monkey Wars by Deborah Blum). Sapolsky may not love his lab rats much, but he certainly loves the baboons and their habitat and has done his bit to try to protect them. And A Primate's Memoir is a great way for him to teach others - non-scientists, people who may just be looking for a good read, an adventure, or something about Africa, maybe -about the way things go when you're a field researcher hanging out with baboons in Kenya!
Rating:
Summary: Entertaining and enlightening memoir of primate life.
Review: As much fun to read as any book by Redmond O'Hanlon or Gerald Durrell, A Primate's Memoir is funny, irreverent, and full of adventure, while also being a serious scientific study of the savanna baboons of Kenya. Sapolsky's goal is to determine the relationship of baboon stress levels to their overall health over a period of years. A neuroscientist, he observes the social hierarchy and interactions of his baboon group, guesses which individuals appear to be most stressed or most relaxed and then checks their hormones and blood chemistry, not an easy procedure, given his clever and not always co-operative population. Sapolsky, who works alone, must first outwit the baboon, use a blowgun to dart him, follow and wait for him to become unconscious, and then carry him half a mile or more to his portable lab facilities, where he then draws blood and does measurements. The baboons, of course, react to stress the way humans do. The title of A Primate's Memoir is deliberately ambiguous--it is both Sapolsky's memoir and that of his baboon population, and his experiences and interactions with the outside world are remarkably similar to theirs. Leaving the relative safety of the game reserves and hitchhiking into dangerous territories during his "down time," Sapolsky describes his travels with enthusiasm, impeccable timing, and great, self-deprecating humor, subtly selecting details which show how similarly he and his baboon population deal with their worlds' uncertainties. Kenya is experiencing civil unrest and corruption; Uganda has just deposed Idi Amin; the Sudan is in the midst of a long civil war; the border of Zaire is under siege; and the Somalis refuse to accept any borders at all, stealing lands and property wherever they go--all dangerous and stressful atmospheres for their populations and for visitors like the author. Sapolsky is a great story teller, however, equally entertaining in presenting both his adventures and his research, his world and that of his baboons. While life may be "nasty, brutish, and short," Sapolsky shows us it's a lot more fun if one keeps a sense of humor--and a lot less stressful.
Rating:
Summary: A Primate's Review
Review: Don't be put off (I almost was, initially) by Sapolsky's smart-alecky humor--you'll very likely come to enjoy it. And there is so much more about this book to like. The author brilliantly describes the places he lives in and travels to in Africa, and the infinitely varied, fascinating (and funny) people he encounters. He has a talent for getting into scary situations and then lucking out of them, so many of his stories make for great, page-turning reading. Best of all, for me, are Sapolsky's memorable, unsentimental, moving stories about the baboons themselves. Almost makes me want to become a primatologist myself (though I don't think I could survive for long on just rice, beans, and canned Taiwanese mackerel.)
Rating:
Summary: A Wonderful Read
Review: Dr. Sapolsky mixes deep personal feelings, intimate recountings of his experiences, and hard science to tell the story of his lifelong work studying the baboons of Kenya. The result is illuminating and entertaining at the same time. As reader, you feel like you are getting the "straight skinny," albeit in a form that is always interesting, and often hilariously funny. There is an apocryphal story going around that Thomas Mann's typist for Joseph and His Brothers said as he finished "So that's what really happened!" (Spolsky, by the way, is not a great fan of Mann -- more smartass hilarity here.) I sort of felt the same way upon finishing this: so that's what really happens with people (Diane Fossey, Laurence of the Hyenas) who go off to Africa to do science. Sapolsky does them all justice. Life is tough, complicated, and rife with compromises, and Sapolsky captures all of this his inimitable style. This is a great book. Read it!
|
