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Rating: 
Summary: Persistence Pays Off
Review: Eminently readable, occasionally touched with a delicious dry wit, "The Alex Studies" is a "must" read for anyone intrested in animal intelligence. Gut instinct. Creative insight. Educated guess. Hypothesis. Call it what you will, this is the ingredient needed to make new discoveries. It's inspiring when a scientist has such a gut instinct that seems off the wall to all others but the scientist nevertheless launches a lifetime of work dedicated to uncovering truth--and against all expectations, turns out to be right. Pepperberg's work with Alex, as described here, is a delightful example of that kind of vision. Her diligence, brilliance, and exceedingly careful work over many years has provided a fascinating expansion of our horizon on animal intelligence. Thoughtful comparisons with similar work on other animals, including human children, were particularly thought-provoking for me.
Rating:
Summary: Persistence Pays Off
Review: Eminently readable, occasionally touched with a delicious dry wit, "The Alex Studies" is a "must" read for anyone intrested in animal intelligence. Gut instinct. Creative insight. Educated guess. Hypothesis. Call it what you will, this is the ingredient needed to make new discoveries. It's inspiring when a scientist has such a gut instinct that seems off the wall to all others but the scientist nevertheless launches a lifetime of work dedicated to uncovering truth--and against all expectations, turns out to be right. Pepperberg's work with Alex, as described here, is a delightful example of that kind of vision. Her diligence, brilliance, and exceedingly careful work over many years has provided a fascinating expansion of our horizon on animal intelligence. Thoughtful comparisons with similar work on other animals, including human children, were particularly thought-provoking for me.
Rating: 
Summary: No parrot jokes please
Review: I can almost hear Irene Pepperberg saying that to us as she describes the significance of THE ALEX STUDIES. She herself offers a few humorous anecdotes about Alex, but for the most part there is definitely nothing funny about this book. It's written in a deliberately prosaic style for the following reasons. The very tendency for the media and general public to treat Alex as simply the "talking parrot", when in reality his vocalizations represent something much more important in terms of animal cognition and communication. Also stemming from the fact that her findings about bird cognition are so significant, Pepperberg in making her case to scientific colleagues, writes with them in mind. She is incredibly detailed in describing her experiments and the controls used. This is in order to avoid the possibility of cueing and thus comparisons to "clever Hans"; she wants to remove the possibility of persons saying the evidence is that most dreaded scientific epithet - merely "anecdotal". The book is replete with references and Pepperberg places them in the body of her text instead of as footnotes. The book is not a smooth read and only a scientist could describe it as "a delightful and easy read" as ethologist Marc Bekoff says on the cover. This is not a popular science book. But equally it takes an evoltionary biologist and ornithologist to see the "groundbreaking" significance of the book as Bernd Heinrich does. Where does that leave us, the general reading public? If you take it in small pecks (couldn't resist one bird metaphor) you will be rewarded by some incredible insights into the cognitive powers of animals. We learn of abilities that scientists said perhaps (and that's a capital "P") resided only in Great Apes. Never was it imagined that birds possesed them. Pepperberg spends chapters discussing different capabilities such as numeric cognition, categorization, and word comprehension. Alex responded to Pepperberg's questions about "what color?" "what shape?" and "how many?" with appropriate answers. By far the most interesting responses were Alex's answers to conceptual problems. When asked "what's different" Alex showed he understood the concept of relativity by answering "larger". The traditional view was that we know that animals are not sentient. Pepperberg's experiments show that what we "know" about animal cognition is not that much at all. How else can it be. Science has a history of a few hundred years and it was not that very long ago that we "knew" that the earth was flat or that it was at the center of the universe. Cognitive Ethology (the study of animal intelligence) is less than a generation old. Perhaps he's not the best source to quote since he's from a comedy, but that man in black, Tommie Lee Jones as "K" was absolutely right when he said "just imagine what we'll know tomorrow."
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Summary: Two decades of research under one cover
Review: Irene Pepperberg summarizes her twenty-something years of research with an African Grey named Alex. This is possibly the most poignant research on animal cognition that I've read. As a scientist, I can appreciate the hard work and dedication that went into this research; as a bird lover and companion to an african grey, I know what every bird lover/companion knows, that birds are intelligent and crafty. Dr. Pepperberg's research is among the first to truly reveal the intelligence of non-mammal species, hence it's monumental importance. Above that, it is easy to read, appreciate and understand. This book is destined to become a classic!
Rating:
Summary: Meticulous
Review: One of the preconceived notions I had before reading this book was that the quality of research would be rather soft around the edges... Sort of "feel good pseudo-science"... I was pleasantly surprised when I learned how meticulous and critical Pepperberg had obviously been in the course of her research. By not being afraid to challenge the traditional beliefs of animal cognition as well as boldy examining the potential pitfalls of her own approach, Pepperberg has delivered a compelling and meticulous body of scientific research that stands on its own. Pseudo-science? Definitely not. Feel good? Well, since I'm a parrot "owner" as well as always being fascinated by the subject of cognition, this book was a great read for me. The one downfall to all of this is that I'm constantly annoying my wife by trying to get her to participate in model-rival training sessions with our own African Grey. The bird, however, indulges me... Im sure he considers my efforts quite amusing.
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Summary: Long time bird owner
Review: This is a very interesting read. It's a bit technical and outlines Dr. Pepperberg's research is great detail. However, anyone who has experience Alex on television will be facinated by his abilities.
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Summary: Essential resource for anyone interested in animal cognition
Review: This is essential reading for anyone interested in animal cognition. Dr. Pepperberg reviews her two decades of careful, systematic work with one African gray parrot and provides a detailed picture of the evolution of her ideas, methodologies and truly mind-boggling data. This is a well-written, easy to follow, well-organized account of her scientific work, of which most people have only had a brief glimpse (either in the press or from documentary films on PBS and the Discovery Channel). The public is becoming increasingly aware of the complexity of animal minds, and I predict that this book will remain an excellent resource for years to come; it not only explain's the writer's seminal contribution to this fascinating interdisciplinary field, it also provides an historical context and theoretical rationale for the work of many other scientists studying language, cognition and animal behavior.
Rating: 
Summary: A bit too technical for my tastes...
Review: Yes, the intelligence and ability of parrots to communicate concepts IS interesting. But wow! This book has far too much technical detail to keep me turning pages. I bought the book to learn about how Alex was trained and how he progressed through the training. But the book goes into too much detail about Pepperberg's scientific and psychological study to keep me awake. Certainly not bedtime reading. I only wish she'd written the book I wanted to read.
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