August 2025: A Primate’s Memoir by Robert M. Sapolsky
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 savanna 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 scientist’s coming-of-age in Africa.
An exhilarating account of Sapolsky’s twenty-one-year study of a troop of rambunctious baboons in Kenya, A Primate’s Memoir interweaves serious scientific observations with wry commentary about the challenges and pleasures of living in the wilds of the Serengeti—for 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 Africa. As he conducts unprecedented physiological research on wild primates, he becomes enamored of his subjects—unique and compelling characters in their own right—and he returns to them summer after summer, until tragedy finally prevents him.
By turns hilarious and poignant, A Primate’s Memoir is a magnum opus from one of our foremost science writers.
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Suggested Indie Bookstores:
Edgartown Books (Edgartown, MA)
The Bookworm (Bernardsville, NJ)
The Book Catapult (San Diego, CA)
Broadway Books (Portland, OR)
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Favorite Quotes:
“I will forever ache with the knowledge that I can never again spend my first weeks out in the bush—a first introduction to the baboons, a first afternoon spent meeting the nearby villagers, the first realization that behind ever bush and tree there was an animal. Each night in my tent, I would fling myself down in exhaustion at all the novelty, with the fatigue of looking and listening and smelling at everything so intently.”
“There was no shortage of explanations for the endless scams and maneuvers and cheatings and victimizations amid a world of people of intense decency. The desperation of being desperately poor. The raw tribal animosities that made ‘us’s’ and ‘them’s’ in ways I couldn’t begin to detect. The most venal of corruption. A Wild West mentality, small-town boredom, unbridled selfish capitalism without even the pretense of regulations and restraint. Maybe this was how my own world worked, if I had ever bothered to experience anything outside of my ivory tower. Maybe this was also how the ivory tower worked, if I wised up a little there as well. But it was a startling revelation, as the animals continued to graze in the museum diorama I thought I had gone to live in. And it was remarkably preparative for my own minor dissent a few months later.”
“I think of being a kid, going to the planetarium in New York, where, for the first time, the size of the solar system was brought home to me. You sit in a room, and above you, models of the planets rotate in concentric circles. The narrator says, Here is this planet, here is that one. Unfortunately, the voice continues, because of the scale of this model, Uranus cannot be contained here, a it would be across the street, in Central Park. And Pluto would not be contained here; it would be in . . . Cleveland. My god, you think, this is a big universe.”
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Other Stuff I’m Into Right Now:
Slow weekends
Pink hair
Running
Putting on a big sweatshirt after a day at the beach
Watching the pets take naps in the sun
English muffins
