A Primate's Memoir: A Neuroscientist's Unconventional Life Among the Baboons

13 hrs. 26 min.

Popular Science

Language Russian

Author Robert Sapolsky

Narrator Vasily Michkov

Description

This book is a memoir of more than twenty years of Robert Sapolsky’s acquaintance with East Africa. When the author was still very young, he first arrived at a reserve in Kenya with the intention of testing his ideas about the nature of stress in humans using wild baboons—something not surprising given how similar primates are to people in their biological and psychological responses. In a way, Sapolsky doesn’t separate himself from his subjects—test animals, which is obvious already from the title of the book. And that lends the narration a special charm and power.

Together with the author, who gave his beloved charges biblical names, we learn about their lives, sufferings, love, rivalries, the struggle for power, diseases, and death. No less vivid characters of the book are local people: farmers, gamekeepers, minor officials, and ordinary hard workers. Over two decades in Africa, Sapolsky experiences both his own dangerous adventures and his friends’ tragedies, as well as shifts in political regimes—and he writes about it so that you almost feel like a participant in the events.