A Primate's Memoir: A Neuroscientist's Unconventional Life Among the Baboons (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780743202411)

In the tradition of Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey, Robert Sapolsky, a foremost science writer and recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant, tells the mesmerizing story of his twenty-one years in remote Kenya with a troop of savanna baboons.

"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 Africa.

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 Africa. As he conducts unprecedented physiological research on wild primates, he becomes 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.

Author: Robert M. Sapolsky
ISBN-10: 0743202414
ISBN-13: 9780743202411
Publisher: Scribner Book Company
Language: English
Published: 03/12/2002
Pages: 304
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.61lbs
Size: 8.08h x 5.92w x 0.74d

Review Citation(s):
New York Times 03/03/2002 pg. 20
Entertainment Weekly 03/01/2002 pg. 73
Commonweal 06/17/2005 pg. 27