In the Kingdom of Gorillas: Fragile Species in a Dangerous Land

Mountain gorillas also fascinated Robert Sapolsky, but, as he writes in A Primate's Memoir, he joined a baboon troop in Kenya's Serengeti Plain instead. The year was 1978, when I, too, made my first trip to Africa and was fleeced on the streets of Nairobi by probably some of the same con artists (with their eye for American pigeons) whom he describes. Rarely have I encountered a scientist who became so attached to his study animals, giving them biblical names and roles and fleshing out descriptions of their individual personalities the way he might his childhood chums. Which makes it all the more horrifying when, after twenty years of increasingly intimate acquaintance, his baboon friends begin dying, one after another, for preventable reasons that he can do nothing about. A tale of deep humanity played out between two primate species, the book resonates with humor but also with the outsize emotions: sorrow and fear and joy.

Steven N. Austad is a professor of zoology at the University of Idaho and the author of Why We Age: What Science Is Discovering About the Body's Journey Through Life (John Wiley and Sons, 1997).

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