Interspersed with reflections gleaned from traveling across East Africa in the 1970s and 1980s, A Primate's Memoir is, truly, mostly about baboons. How they spend their lives. How they live and love and grow and die. While interweaving observations from his own life with those of the baboons gives a stronger feeling of kinship to Sapolsky's subjects, it also provides the reader with a localized, and thus fairly novel, insight into a changing African landscape of ecosystems and cultures.
Throughout Sapolsky does mercifully little soap-boxing - and when he does it seems eminently forgivable. By remaining introspective and self-deprecating, Sapolsky transparently exploits his own foibles and shortcomings. His wit and awareness make this work at turns humorous and heartbreaking, light and morose. Sapolsky has pulled off the neat trick of conveying his depth of care and appreciation for this one corner of the natural world, and the need for conservation, without sounding preachy or condescending to the unlettered audience. A fine read for anyone passionate about field work, conservation, or how we find our place in a complicated world when the answers are far from straightforward.
