A Primate's Memoir: A Neuroscientist's Unconventional Life Among the Baboons
by Robert M. Sapolsky
from Scribner
Robert Sapolsky, the author of Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers and other popular books on animal and human behavior, decided early in life to become a primatologist, volunteering at the American Museum of Natural History and badgering his high school principal to let him study Swahili to prepare for travel in Africa. When he set out to conduct fieldwork as a young graduate student, though, Sapolsky found that life among a Kenyan baboon troop was markedly different from his earlier bookish studies. Among other things, he confesses, he had to become a master of shooting anesthetic darts into his subjects with a blowgun to take blood samples, a mastery that required him to become "a leering slinky silent quicksilver baboon terror." He also had to learn how to negotiate the complexities of baboon politics, endure the difficulties of life in the bush, and subsist on cases of canned mackerel and beans.
His memoir is, in the main, quite humorous, although Sapolsky flings a few darts along the way at the late activist Dian Fossey--who, he hints, may have indirectly caused the deaths of her beloved mountain gorillas by her unstable, irrational dealings with local people--and at local bureaucrats whose interests did not often coincide with those of Sapolsky's wild charges. It is also full of good information on primates and primatology, a subject whose practitioners, it seems, are constantly fighting to save species and ecosystems. "Every primatologist I know is losing that battle," he writes. "They make me think of someone whose unlikely job would be to collect snowflakes, to rush into a warm room and observe the unique pattern under a microscope before it melts and is never seen again." --Gregory McNamee
"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 remote 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 the farthest vestiges of unspoiled Africa. As he conducts unprecedented physiological research on wild primates, he becomes evermore 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.
Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human
by Elizabeth Hess
from Bantam
Could an adorable chimpanzee raised from infancy by a human family bridge the gap between species—and change the way we think about the boundaries between the animal and human worlds? Here is the strange and moving account of an experiment intended to answer just those questions, and the astonishing biography of the chimp who was chosen to see it through.
Dubbed Project Nim, the experiment was the brainchild of Herbert S. Terrace, a psychologist at Columbia University. His goal was to teach a chimpanzee American Sign Language in order to refute Noam Chomsky’s assertion that language is an exclusively human trait. Nim Chimpsky, the baby chimp at the center of this ambitious, potentially groundbreaking study, was “adopted” by one of Dr. Terrace’s graduate students and brought home to live with her and her large family in their elegant brownstone on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
At first Nim’s progress in learning ASL and adapting to his new environment exceeded all expectations. His charm, mischievous sense of humor, and keen, sometimes shrewdly manipulative understanding of human nature endeared him to everyone he met, and even led to guest appearances on Sesame Street, where he was meant to model good behavior for toddlers. But no one had thought through the long-term consequences of raising a chimp in the human world, and when funding for the study ran out, Nim’s problems began.
Over the next two decades, exiled from the people he loved, Nim was rotated in and out of various facilities. It would be a long time before this chimp who had been brought up to identify with his human caretakers had another opportunity to blow out the candles on a cake celebrating his birthday. No matter where he was sent, however, Nim’s hard-earned ability to converse with humans would prove to be his salvation, protecting him from the fate of many of his peers.
Drawing on interviews with the people who lived with Nim, diapered him, dressed him, taught him, and loved him, Elizabeth Hess weaves an unforgettable tale of an extraordinary and charismatic creature. His story will move and entertain at the same time that it challenges us to ask what it means to be human, and what we owe to the animals who so enrich our lives.
Monkey Portraits
by Jill Greenberg
from Little, Brown and Company
Book Description:
We share about 98 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees, our closest biological cousins. And never have the similarities between simians and humans been so amusingly and brilliantly captured as in Monkey Portratis. Jill Greenberg has spent 15 years photographing celebrities--from Clint Eastwood to Drew Barrymore--for leading publications, but has recently focused on actors of a different sort. She has been photographing monkeys and apes, many of whom have appeared on film or in television shows. Her intimate portraits of these animals convey a startling range of emotions and personalities, and evoke an almost eerie sense of recognition. Each of these 76 amazingly anthropomorphic photographs will remind you of someone you know. These monkeys in all their glory will cause you to laugh out loud and to wonder just how different we truly are.
Monkey Business
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Book Description:We share about 98 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees, our closest biological cousins. And never have the similarities between simians and humans been so amusingly and brilliantly captured as in Monkey Portratis. Jill Greenberg has spent 15 years photographing celebrities--from Clint Eastwood to Drew Barrymore--for leading publications, but has recently focused on actors of a different sort. She has been photographing monkeys and apes, many of whom have appeared on film or in television shows. Her intimate portraits of these animals convey a startling range of emotions and personalities, and evoke an almost eerie sense of recognition. Each of these 76 amazingly anthropomorphic photographs will remind you of someone you know. These monkeys in all their glory will cause you to laugh out loud and to wonder just how different we truly are.Monkey Business DaxPumpkin Mala Dax [Exclusive Outtake]Dax [Exclusive Outtake]
Gorillas in the Mist
by Dian Fossey
from Mariner Books
In 1963, an occupational therapist from Kentucky, in uncertain health and spirits, traveled to central Africa in the quixotic hope of seeing a mountain gorilla in its natural habitat. Dian Fossey had read everything she could about the reclusive and much-feared animal, and she returned from her trip convinced that most of the books were wrong.
During her seven-week stay in Africa, Fossey had a chance encounter with the famed primatologists Mary and Louis Leakey, who encouraged her to follow her dream of living among the mountain gorillas and learning their ways. In 1967 she did just that, setting up a camp on the slopes of the 14,000-foot Virunga Volcanoes of Rwanda and studying four gorilla families there. Although it took them some time to accept Fossey's presence among them, she was immediately impressed by their peaceful nature and by their generous, guileless behavior--so unlike the images found in popular culture.
But, Fossey discovered, despite their peaceable way of life, the gorillas had many enemies in the form of poachers who hunted them for their hands, skins, and heads--ghastly remains sold to the tourist market. Much of Fossey's thoughtful but often rightly angry memoir Gorillas in the Mist is a well-reasoned plea for the protection of the gorillas and the suppression of the poachers' black market. That argument found a wide audience when her book was published in 1983, but Fossey's work remains unfinished: she was murdered, probably by those very poachers, in 1985, and today there are fewer than 650 mountain gorillas in the wild. To read Gorillas in the Mist is a first step for anyone concerned with their preservation, and that of other wild species everywhere. --Gregory McNamee
One of the most important books ever written about our connection to the natural world, GORILLAS IN THE MIST is the riveting account of Dian Fossey's thirteen years in a remote African rain forest with the greatest of the great apes. Fossey's extraordinary efforts to ensure the future of the rain forest and its remaining mountain gorillas are captured in her own words and in candid photographs of this fascinating endangered species. As only she could, Fossey combined her personal adventure story with groundbreaking scientific reporting in an unforgettable portrait of one of our closest primate relatives. Although Fossey's work ended tragically in her murder, GORILLAS IN THE MIST remains an invaluable testament to one of the longest-running field studies of primates and reveals her undying passion for her subject.
Bigfoot Casebook updated: Sightings And Encounters from 1818 to 2004
by Janet Bord
from Pine Winds Pr
A chronological list of Bigfoot (Sasquatch) sightigs and encounters from 1818 to 2004 in North America. Representative stories of encounters are included with many drawings and photos. Includes bibliographical references and index.
Bigfoot! : The True Story of Apes in America
by Loren Coleman
from Paraview Pocket Books
For years, scientists and researchers have studied, speculated about, and searched for an enigmatic creature that is legendary in the annals of American folklore. Now, learn the truth about...
BIGFOOT!
In this fascinating and comprehensive look at the fact, fiction, and fable of the North American "Sasquatch," award-winning author Loren Coleman takes readers on a journey into America's biggest mystery -- could an unrecognized "ape" be living in our midst? Drawing on over forty years of investigations, interviews, and fieldwork on these incredible beasts, Coleman explores the modern debates about these powerful, ape-like creatures, why they have remained a mystery for so long, and what we can learn about ourselves from these animals, our nearest cousins!
From reports of Bigfoot's existence found in ancient Native American traditions, to the controversial Patterson-Gimlin film of a Bigfoot in the wild, to today's Internet sites that record the sightings almost as soon as they occur, Coleman uncovers the past, explains the present, and considers the future of one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in the natural world.
Next of Kin: My Conversations with Chimpanzees
by Roger Fouts
from Harper Paperbacks
For three decades, primatologist Roger Fouts has been involved in language studies of the chimpanzee, the animal most closely related to human beings. Among his subjects was the renowned Washoe, who was "endowed with a powerful need to learn and communicate," and who developed an extraordinary vocabulary in American sign language. Another chimpanzee, Fouts writes, "never made a grammatical error," which turned a whole school of linguistic theory upside down. While reporting these successes, Fouts also notes that chimpanzees are regularly abused in laboratory settings and that in the wild their number has fallen from 5,000,000 to fewer than 175,000 in the last century.
For 30 years Roger Fouts has pioneered communication with chimpanzees through sign language--beginning with a mischievous baby chimp named Washoe. This remarkable book describes Fout's odyssey from novice researcher to celebrity scientist to impassioned crusader for the rights of animals. Living and conversing with these sensitive creatures has given him a profound appreciation of what they can teach us about ourselves. It has also made Fouts an outspoken opponent of biomedical experimentation on chimpanzees. A voyage of scientific discovery and interspecies communication, this is a stirring tale of friendship, courage, and compassion that will change forever the way we view our biological--and spritual--next of kin.
Dog Behaviour, Evolution, and Cognition (Oxford Biology)
by Adam Miklosi
from Oxford University Press, USA
This is the first book to collate and synthesise the recent burgeoning primary research literature on dog behaviour, evolution and cognition. The author presents a new ecological approach to the understanding of dog behaviour, demonstrating how dogs can be the subject of rigorous and productive scientific study without the need to confine them to a laboratory environment.
Dog Behaviour, Evolution, and Cognition starts with an overview of the conceptual and methodological issues associated with the study of the dog, followed by a brief description of their role in human society--almost a third of human families share their daily life with a dog! An evolutionary perspective is then introduced with a summary of current research into the process of domestication. The central part of the book is devoted to issues relating to the cognitive aspects of behavior which have received particular attention in recent years from both psychologists and ethologists. The book's final chapters introduce the reader to many novel approaches to dog behavior, set in the context of behavioral development and genetics.
Directions for future research are highlighted throughout the text which also incorporates links to human and primate research by drawing on homologies and analogies in both evolution and behavior. The book will therefore be of relevance and use to anyone with an interest in behavioral ecology including graduate students of animal behavior and cognition, as well as a more general audience of dog enthusiasts, biologists, psychologists and sociologists.
Songs of the Gorilla Nation: My Journey Through Autism
by Dawn Phd Prince-Hughes
from Three Rivers Press
In this elegant and thought-provoking memoir, Dawn Prince-Hughes traces her personal growth from undiagnosed autism to the moment, as a young woman, when she entered the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle and became immediately fascinated with the gorillas. By observing them and, later, working with them, Prince-Hughes was finally able to emerge from her solitude and connect to living beings in a way she had never previously experienced.
More than a story of autism, Songs of the Gorilla Nation is a poignant, beautifully written exploration of the rich landscape of human emotion and the ways we learn to love.
The Impenetrable Forest: My Gorilla Years in Uganda, Revised Edition
by Thor Hanson
from 1500 Books LLC
A self-described eco-nerd Thor Hanson, scientist and writer, brought the nascent gorilla tourist program in Bwindi National Park, located within Africa's Impenetrable Forest, to life. With grace and good humor Hanson navigates the local customs, mores and bureaucracy governing everything from love to superstition to build infrastructure, hire and train staff, fend off millions of ants among many other creatures while studying and acclimating the mountain gorillas to humans in their midst.
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