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A Primate's Memoir
A Primate's Memoir
Author: Robert M. Sapolsky
"I had never planned to become a savanna baboon when I grew up; instead, I had always assumed I would become a mountain gorilla," writes Robert Sapolsky in this witty and riveting chronicle of a scientist's coming-of-age in remote Africa. Raised in an intellectual, immigrant family in Brooklyn, Sapolsky wished he could live in the primate dioram...  more »
ISBN-13: 9780743202473
ISBN-10: 0743202473
Publication Date: 3/27/2001
Pages: 304
Rating:
  • Currently 4.2/5 Stars.
 9

4.2 stars, based on 9 ratings
Publisher: Scribner
Book Type: Hardcover
Other Versions: Paperback
Members Wishing: 0
Reviews: Member | Amazon | Write a Review

Top Member Book Reviews

reviewed A Primate's Memoir on + 46 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 1
Sapolsky, a professor of biology and neurology at Sanford University, traveled each summer for almost two decades to East Africa to study the relationship between stress in disease in a troop of baboons. He tells many tales of his experiences in Africa, alone in the Serengeti "with no radio, no television, no electricity, no running water, and no telephone. His nearest neighbors are the Masai, a warlike tribespeople whose marriages are polygamous, with wedding parties featuring tureens of cow's blood." There is story after amazing story, near death encounters, rampant corruption on all levels of government and even just crossing borders. His writing is clever and compelling, captivating, with some stories hilarious, others quite sad. His fondness for "his" baboons is well communicated, his description of their interactions and behavior so cleverly detailed, I felt I sitting next to him observing! Overall an excellent read.
Trey avatar reviewed A Primate's Memoir on + 260 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 1
I really liked A Primate's Memoir, for a lot of reasons. The opening line among them...

I joined the baboon troop during my twenty-first year. I had never planned to become a savanna baboon when I grew up; instead, I had always assumed I would become a mountain gorilla.

That first line had me when it was used on NPR years ago, and it worked well when I read the book. The book recounts Sapolsky's adventures studying a babboon troop in Kenya and knocking about Africa and by turns its interesting, amusing, harrowing and moving. Sapolsky humanizes the baboons, or at least makes them interesting and sympathetic to me - a reach because I file them under "Carnivorous and too damn clever for my comfort."
The book closes sadly for me because the troop gets nailed by something that is entirely avoidable, but every day in Kenya.
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reviewed A Primate's Memoir on + 38 more book reviews
I really enjoyed this book. I loved the stories of the people and culture the author encountered in Africa, mostly in Kenya. To me, the slowest parts of the book were when he wrote about the baboons he was there to study.


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