A Primate's Memoir: A Neuroscientist's Unconventional Life Among the Baboons

Absolutely wonderful. Combines the best of biography and nonfiction - highly recommend. I will never be able to live this life. But as only an incredibly candid autobiography can, I feel I experienced a slice. It’s full of vivid human stories and all the complexity that lives in places near and far, similar and oh so different. Of course when someone who spent 20 years studying humans primate relatives camped in the bush trains his observing eye on people, the perspective is bound to be more insightful. Really fascinating lens into Kenya and east Africa broadly, what it’s like to do field science as an academic, overlap of masai culture and rapidly urbanizing nation, full of conflict and history. At the same time, it’s a wonderful way to learn about animal behavior and biology, from social status and its effects on our biology to how personality and community can mediate this. By switching back and forth between the affairs of the baboon troop and the human affairs every chapter, the connection is oh so clear but still subtle. Our primate ancestors are not so different from us after all, and oh so worth studying and protecting. Final note on just how bad humans have been and continue to be for the natural world. Lots of harrowing stories hear of total apathy to nature. I hope deeply we can find a way to thrive by supporting the natural world we depend on, not at its expense. Will carry a bit more environmentalist fervor into my work after reading. Thank you prof sapolsky.