Reviews

I really enjoyed this! Written in such an interesting and entertaining way. The travel stories are incredible and I cried at the end. Love you, Benjamin 🐵🫰🏼

rachel_juliane's review against another edition

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emotional funny informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

4.75

gdp60's review against another edition

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5.0

Wow! An amazing memoir. Very unique "insider" look into africa and Kenya. Interesting to learn about baboons, but also Masai people and culture. Loved the casual storytelling voice he used.

kandicez's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional funny hopeful informative inspiring sad slow-paced

5.0

I know we are only one month in, but this is my favorite book of the year so far, and I think it could last. This was at turns funny, heartbreaking, enlightening, and because it inspired a deep dive into Sapolsky in general, incredibly informative.

This outlines a few decades of Sapolsky's summers in the field studying a troop of olive baboons. He starts with his first year and ends with a tragedy. A tragedy that in hindsight is small, but as I read I was heartbroken.

Sapolsky is a neuroendocrinelogist, and believes that there is no free will. He believes that hormones, ancestry, genes, any number of things, predetermine our actions and reactions. There is a sense of comfort to be found in the theory, although I don't quite believe it myself.

kevin_shepherd's review against another edition

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5.0

“If you live in a baboon troop in the Serengeti, you only have to work three hours a day for your calories, and predators don't mess with you much. What that means is you've got nine hours of free time every day to devote to generating psychological stress toward other animals in your troop. So the baboon is a wonderful model for living well enough and long enough to pay the price for all the social-stressor nonsense that they create for each other. They're just like us: They're not getting done in by predators and famines, they're getting done in by each other.” -RS

An enormous percentage of baboon aggression consists of a pissed-off baboon taking out his frustrations on an innocent bystander. They are, at once, desperately dependent on each other and generally horrible to each other. In other words, they are the perfect stand-in for us. That’s why Robert Sapolsky, a brilliant but surprisingly gullible grad student, chose to study baboons for his thesis on blood born stress hormones.

About a hundred pages in I was convinced that this book was going to be a huge disappointment. I had wrongly assumed that this would be an in-depth study, à la Jane Goodall or Dian Fosse, on baboon societies and social orders. I should have gleaned from the title that the “primate” in A Primate’s Memoir is, in fact, Robert Sapolsky; I should have noticed that the subtitle, A Neuroscientist’s Unconventional Life Among the Baboons, plainly states “NEUROSCIENTIST” and not “behavioralist” or “primatologist.” I simply wasn’t paying attention.

All my misgivings were in error. Young Sapolsky may be a lot of things—quirky, naive, gullible (I said that already but it bears repeating), inordinately empathetic (hence the gullibility)—but he’s NOT disappointing. Sure, baboons and baboon hierarchies are only about 50% (my generous estimate) of this book, but the rest is a phenomenal telling of one man’s transformation from concerned spectator to passionate activist. This turned out to be one of the most moving things I’ve read all year. Five stars.
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*It’s worth noting the anti-travelogue essence of the author’s experiences. The East Africa of Primate’s Memoir is dangerous and corrupt and full of humanoid shysters and thieves and con artists. Sapolsky put me off Kenya the way Midnight Express put me off Turkey. I’m not visiting either anytime soon.

ljwalsh33's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional funny inspiring medium-paced

4.25

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