Lament

Twenty years ago, when I lived in Tucson, Arizona, I enjoyed shopping at a small, neighborhood bookstore called Books Brothers. I became friends with the owners, and could talk with them about their current recommendation or anything else that popped into my hollow little head.

However, the number of independently owned bookstores has fallen in the U.S. from 4,000 in 1990 to less than 2,000 in 2007. (http://articles.sfgate.com/2007-06-17/business/17250973_1_number-of-independent-booksellers-diesel-cody-s-books) Although I can't vouch for the accuracy of the reporter's data, personal perception supports such figures. In the neighborhood just north of the Atlanta area where I live now, we have only one bookstore, and that one a mega-store, and although I can talk to the staff, they obviously have little personal stake in the store itself.

Embarrassingly, I find myself part of the problem ... if problem it is. My first impulse in book hunting is to use the county library. That resource has felt the sting of declining government revenues, so I want to do all I can to support them. If I can't find a book I want at the library, though, and feel like splurging, I use the Internet to track down the volume. I don't buy on-line, though; I would rather walk into a brick-and-mortar shop, and talk with flesh-and-blood people. I want to ask a human being if he or she has read the book. I want to put my physical sawbucks into an outstretched hand. I want to support someone in his or her efforts to keep food on the table. (Of course, even buying on-line puts food on somebody's table.) I can foresee a time, though, when I may not have that option, and that makes me blue.

Neurobiology and the baboons

As a child, Robert M. Sapolsky wandered among museum dioramas, and fantasized about being a mountain gorilla. Instead of achieving that laudable goal, though, he grew up to receive his Bachelor of Arts degree summa cum laude in biological anthropology from Harvard University, and his Ph. D. in neuroendocrinology -- the study of the interactions between the nervous system and the endocrine system. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_M._Sapolsky) Because of the difficulties involved in studying human beings (getting blood samples for analysis during rush hour would present problems), Mr. Sapolsky decided to focus on a troop of baboons in the wild. He chose baboons because although baboons have so much in common physiologically with humans, many of the complicating variables of human social existence don't apply. As Mr. Sapolsky says in an interview published in The Atlantic (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/04/of-monkeys-and-men/3047/), baboons don't smoke, they don't drink, they all have exactly the same diet, they're all lean, they're all healthy. He chose to study wild animals because the caged life produces a profound difference in the type and intensity of hormones.

Stories of his first 20 or so years of field work on the Serengeti plains of Africa make up his book, A Primate's Memoir. (http://books.simonandschuster.com/Primate's-Memoir/Robert-M-Sapolsky/9780743202411) Mr. Sapolsky's wit is sharp, and some of his antidotes are knee-slapping funny. Others are poignant and thoughtful. The book is structured in four parts, each focusing on a specific era in the life of a baboon: The Adolescent Years; The Subadult Years; Tenuous Adulthood; and Adulthood. Each of the four parts begins with a chapter devoted to The Baboons. The rest of the subsections range widely over the joys and stresses of being a research student in Africa, including the people met and the privations dealt with.

One of the biggest distractions, however, is Mr. Sapolsky's linear view of evolution as moving toward an apex of human endeavor. It may simply be that since he is a human being writing for other human beings, his writing naturally tends to focus on human beings. The heavily anthropological tilt to the book might have been helped by a bit more insight into the evolution of the primates themselves, but then again, that would have been another book altogether, and since I'm not the author, I shouldn't presume to say what should have been written. I guess.