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A Primate's Memoirs: A Neuroscientist's Unconventional Life Among the Baboons
by Robert M. Sapolsky,
Scribner, 2001. 25.00 (304 pages)
ISBN 0 743 20247 3
I will admit from the outset that Robert Sapolsky is one of my heroes. During my junior year of college, I read his treatise ‘Stress, the Aging Brain, and the Mechanisms of Neuron Death’ 1. Twice. Although I never went on to study stress, aging or neuron death, the book made me realize that one could be both a neuroscientist and a field biologist…and be good ones. Sapolsky showed that this two-pronged approach to the study of the brain and behavior was both intellectually fertile and loads of fun. I've been trying to be like him ever since, and A Primate's Memoirs is the book I would want to write someday – the true-life adventure story of 20 or so summers studying primates in the Serengeti plains of East Africa. From these pages, we learn much about primates, both human and non-human, and about humility (and humour) in the face of adversity.
