A Primate's Memoir

"That question is, effectively, Sapolsky’s impish humour at work. It’s sometimes not clear if his pen is aimed at baboons or at us. There’s good reason for that ambiguity, of course, because we share a common ancestor with baboons; a lot of similarities that we see in their behaviour, from grooming, to dominance displays, to foraging habits, have to do with our shared evolutionary history. But baboons don’t write books, so a gifted storyteller has the upper hand on this point. Sapolsky’s book is my favourite in the modern scientist-author canon. It was a template for my own book because so much of the story about figuring out his troop of baboons in Kenya was really a story about Sapolsky’s own scientific career. He places you in his shoes, and shows you how his ensemble cast of baboons (generations of them, actually) have personality, agency, and succumb to the same foibles that we do. At the same time, Sapolsky doesn’t downshift the science, and gives the reader the how and the why of understanding their social networks via study of their blood biochemistry). At no point do you feel like you’ve been misled, or been given a cliched misadventure—his stories are as authentic as they are laugh-out-loud funny. The healthy doses of humour in the book make you appreciate that scientists are both fun and funny, which few other books have done. And that you don’t need to worry too much about that primate that you see in the mirror. You’re safe in the hands of a peripatetic, twinkly-eyed guide, who you can trust with your most intimate questions about the planet’s top predator."