Earlier I reviewed Why Don’t Zebra’s Get Ulcers by Robert Sapolsky as a part of my mental health month and I already have Behave sitting in my pile; Robert Sapolsky, either through listened to lectures or his books, has been a subject I’ve no doubt my friends are getting tired of hearing about.
A Primate’s Memoir, however, is not the same breed of popular science book as Sapolsky’s other work, but rather a straightforward memoir about his experiences as a field researcher in Africa.
Sapolsky details his twenty-plus years living with a troop of baboons, their culture, and the conflicts in the scientific community of speaking about animal culture in human terms. He also details cultural shocks living among and interacting with different tribes and in different African countries and often his own fumbling unpreparedness as he adapts (including a notable horrifying first experience with tamarind).
The memoir includes harrowing stories of being taken captive, having guns held to his head, being mistaken for a mercenary, and in general the sort of adventures that come to a certain breed of guy™ with an irreverence and compelling story telling style.
He’s the sort of unassuming person that the vanilla masses probably believe just sits in a lab and wouldn’t expect to have spent a time traveling with a caravan of Somalis plundering locals, and yet.
The book is a compelling, engaging, very intelligently and thoughtfully written account. Sapolsky brings an honesty and no-bullshit narrative voice to his time in Africa while offering the perspective that he is just one researcher who has dealt with corruption, with cultural shocks, with various international blocks and that there is so much more to field research and medicine than most people realize.
Aliactast 