A Primate’s Memoir: Love, Death and Baboons in East Africa
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‘I had never plotted to become a Savannah baboon when I grew up; as a replacement for I assumed I would become a mountain gorilla,’ writes Robert Sapolsky in this riveting chronicle of a scientist’s coming of age in remote Africa. Upon graduating from college, a booksmart and naive Sapolsky leaves the comforts of the Northeastern United States for the very first time, to join a baboon troop in Kenya as a young transfer male’. An practiced in primate behaviour, Sapolsky sets out to study the relationship between stress and disease. As he observes the Machiavellian politics of the troop, giving the primates biblical names and pinpointing his favourite (Benjamin) and his nemesis (Nebuchadnezzar), he also immerses himself in the society of the neighbouring Masai tribesmen and ventures far from his camp on a series of jaw-dropping adventures. Combining irreverence and humour with the best credentials in his meadow, Sapolsky writes as originally and vividly about people and their society as he does about animals and theirs. “A Primate’s Memoir” is the culmination of over two decades of experience and research – an astonishing masterpiece from the unique talent Oliver Sacks has called ‘one of the best scientist-writers of our time.’Amazon.com Review
Robert Sapolsky, the leader of Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers and additional well loved books on animal and human behavior, chose early in life to become a primatologist, volunteering at the American Museum of Natural History and badgering his high school principal to let him study Swahili to prepare for travel in Africa. When he set out to conduct fieldwork as a young graduate student, though, Sapolsky establish that life among a Kenyan baboon troop was markedly different from his earlier bookish studies. Among additional things, he confesses, he had to become a master of shooting anesthetic darts into his subjects with a blowgun to take blood samples, a mastery that required him to become “a leering slinky silent quicksilver baboon terror.” He also had to learn how to negotiate the complexities of baboon politics, suffer the difficulties of life in the bush, and subsist on cases of canned mackerel and beans.
His memoir is, in the main, reasonably humorous, although Sapolsky flings a few darts along the way at the late liberal Dian Fossey–who, he hints, may have indirectly caused the deaths of her beloved mountain gorillas by her unstable, irrational dealings with local people–and at local bureaucrats whose interests did not regularly coincide with persons of Sapolsky’s wild charges. It is also full of excellent information on primates and primatology, a theme whose practitioners, it seems, are constantly fighting to save species and ecosystems. “Every primatologist I know is losing that battle,” he writes. “They make me reflect of a name whose unlikely job would be to collect snowflakes, to rush into a warm room and observe the unique pattern under a microscope before it melts and is never seen again.” –Gregory McNamee
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Very disappointed; I feel I wasted my money and time. I bought the book based on a piece on NPR. I guess I misunderstood. I was looking for something more informative, educational and with much more about the babooons. Probably partly my fault. I should have known from the title; it’s a memoir.
I didn’t do a page count, but it left me with the feeling that pages dedicated to life with the baboons were in the minority.
It wasn’t entertaining, appealing, or well-written enough to be a excellent novel. It wasn’t educational or informational enough to be excellent non-fiction. There are fantastic books, both fiction and non, about life experiences in Africa and also fantastic books by/about primatologists and their work. In my opinion, this book isn’t very excellent as either.
Even as a memoir I didn’t care for it, but it seems that most of the additional reviewers did. The book jacket artwork is very nice.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
I’m worried that I would hesitate to recommend this book to any of my animal lover friends. Although very amusing at points, the tale can be very depressing and sends out all the incorrect messages to budding conservationists. It only takes one excellent man to turn his back on a excellent cause for things to spiral out of control. Therefore if having to read a ‘Primate’s Memoir’ take it as one man’s experience and not an instruction to give up on the fight to save the environment and wildlife of our planet.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
Am I the only one who can’t help the feeling that this leader is, with all excellent intentions, living a traditional colonial scientist fantasy, and that his relationship to animals and the baboons could stand a small critical scrutiny? Once you get past the overly-full-of-himself amusing bits, there are lots of descriptions of Africans that consistently have the ring of “geez, these backward people are soo amusing!” When scientists from Nairobi come to work with Sapolsky on a TB outbreak, they aren’t described as brilliant scientists, they are helpmates, assisting the fantastic bwana in his quest. The leader talks about how he likes his baboons, but he has a traditional scientific theme/object relationship with them: he anaesthetizes them, then takes blood samples. When effective at his lab in the US, his research causes the death and suffering of many animals for the cause of medicine. I find the leader’s ethics and positioning towards African people and animals questionable. Not to condemn, but please — I miss a critical angle in the reviews that are already here.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
For the first 2/3rds of “A Primate’s Memoir” I fully plotted to give it a 5 star rating. I was enjoying it painstakingly, laughing hysterically, & even wondering if my ex- antipathy towards baboons was misplaced. Then Robert Sapolsky hit me with a revelation that repulsed me so completely I couldn’t fully delight in the book afterwards.
The dreadful revelation? That during his 9 months a year in the US, he personally oversees the torture, maiming & hideous deaths of lab animals. Not mice. Primates. I’ve heard all the justifications; Sapolsky tries to diminish the blow by recalling his father’s descent into Alzheimers & how he’d do “anything” to keep this from happening again. Sorry, Robert but your father, my father, I don’t care what human is simply not vital enough to justify the torture of animal experimentation. Sapolsky admits to having nightmares of being Dr. Mengele. GOOD! He is.
Personally I cannot reconcile a man who identifies so fervently with his baboon troop that he can view his own life thru theirs, carry a picture of his favorite member Benjamin in his wallet, admit that he wanted to grow up “to be a mountain gorilla” yet return to the US & commit unspeakable acts upon the domestic cousins of his beloved primates. I marvel if he can reconcile it himself; maybe this book is a form of apology to the animals he feels he has betrayed.
Politics & morality aside, “A Primate’s Memoir” is quick-moving, amusing, & very appealing. If at times the leader seems to condescend when discussing the Africans he lived amongst, it must have been hard to write about the inevitable culture clash lacking seeming patriarchal. If Sapolsky had just refrained from discussing his American activities, I could unreservedly recommend this book.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
lo he pasado como un chino leyendo este libro. ¿quien dijo que los papiones son diferentes del hombre?
Miguelito
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5