Primate's Memoir

In the tradition of Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey, Robert Sapolsky, a foremost science writer and recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant, tells the mesmerizing story of his twenty-one years in remote Kenya with a troop of Savannah baboons.I had never planned to become a savanna baboon when I grew up; instead, I had always assumed I would become a mountain gorilla, writes Robert Sapolsky in this witty and riveting chronicle of a scientists coming-of-age in remote Africa. An exhilarating account of Sapolskys twenty-one-year study of a troop of rambunctious baboons in Kenya, A Primates Memoir interweaves serious scientific observations with wry commentary about the challenges and pleasures of living in the wilds of the Serengetifor man and beast alike. Over two decades, Sapolsky survives culinary atrocities, gunpoint encounters, and a surreal kidnapping, while witnessing the encroachment of the tourist mentality on the farthest vestiges of unspoiled Africa. As he conducts unprecedented physiological research on wild primates, he becomes evermore enamored of his subjectsunique and compelling characters in their own rightand he returns to them summer after summer, until tragedy finally prevents him. By turns hilarious and poignant, A Primates Memoir is a magnum opus from one of our foremost science writers.