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Inconvenience Store
BOOK REVIEW: A Primate’s Memoir
A Neuroscientist’s Unconventional Life among the Baboons
Robert M. Sapolsky, 2001, Scribner
Just put it down and I’m not really sure what’s gonna roll off the ends of my fingers as they aim for this key or that.
But I DO have to review it.
It’s VERY good.
It would be a shame to let it go by, unremarked upon.
The title gives you a glimpse of at least the general vicinity of where the stories take place, but that’s about it.
I dunno.
Baboons, humans, buffalo, elephants, gorillas, airplanes, Masai warriors drinking bloodsicles produced using a scientific stash of dry ice, liberal lefties, corrupt game park officials poaching what they’re supposed to be protecting, elderly Brit colonials, Dian Fossey’s grave, bovine tuberculosis, Mau Mau uprisings, army checkpoints, scams, ripoffs, starving children, on and on it goes, just as maddeningly African as it can be.
And through it all RS uses his beloved troop of baboons as the glue that binds it all together. Twenty years of tales told.
He invites us into the troop and we come to know and love many of them, by name.
And the interspecies allegories flow richly around all the participants.
Phoo.
You’re just going to have to read this one, ok?
A lifetime resident (despite having travelled all over the damn place at one time or another) of Central Florida, James MacLaren took a four-year degree in death thrills riding giant waves on the North Shore back in the 70's. Wound up in the inconvenience store following a lay off from the Cape, where he was involved with the construction of the Space Shuttle launch pads, among other things. Father of best son in the world.
