54 of 56 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
You dropped your hippocampus, December 8, 2005
This review is from: Monkeyluv: And Other Essays on Our Lives as Animals (Hardcover)
Monkeyluv is worth reading for seven reasons. The first (1) is that you will finally understand how genes work. The first third of the book is all about dispelling the nature vs nurture debate. It's their interaction, stupid! Once you get the picture on genes, there are some other really interesting reasons to read this book. Reasons two through seven: (2) the articles are on subjects as vast and interesting as Münchhausen by Proxy (where a mother intentionally makes her child ill, like the Sixth Sense), aging, and brain controlling parasites. (3) All the articles appeared before in general-reader publications, like Discovery Magazine, so a non-scientist can understand the ideas. (4) The author does a superb job of applying his neurobiology lens (biology of human brains) to a variety of interesting topics. (5) The reader can zip through this book over a weekend and pick up some wow-I-didn't-know-thats to impress his or her friends, neighbors, and colleagues. (6) The essays are concise and (7) sprinkled with popular humor, which remain from their magazine days.
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23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great book about your brain and your body in the world, August 27, 2006
This review is from: Monkeyluv: And Other Essays on Our Lives as Animals (Hardcover)
I absolutely LOVED this book! I read it very quickly and had trouble putting it down. It is fascinating, educational, funny, enjoyable and well written about complex issues.
Sapolsky, who is the author of A Primate's Memoir, The Trouble with Testosterone and Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, is a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford and a recipient of a MacArthur "genius" grant. I found his genius not only to be in his insight and ability to frame questions and pursue their answers, but also to be able to write about it in a way that is accessible to a "nongenius."
This book is a collection of previously published essays that are updated for this edition (the updates include notes for further reading and on source materials). Sapolsky divides the book into three parts ("Genes and Who We Are," "Our Bodies and Who We Are" and "Society and Who We Are") and introduces each section with cogent current thinking on the issues addressed. For example, to introduce the first section, Sapolsky writes about how the nature-nurture argument is a red herring; genes contribute to personality/behavior when the environment interacts with them in ways conducive to gene-induced behavior! For example, in "Of Mice and (Hu)men Genes," Sapolsky writes about genes that may indicate a proclivity for depression, but only in certain environments, and summarizes that the reader should be wary of simple expanations. (And, he asserts, as humans we may have more responsibility to create positive environments that interact benignly with risky genes than to understand which genes cause what.) In the second section's "Why are Dreams Dreamlike?" Sapolsky illustrates how answering some questions about how the brain and psyche function just brings up other, deeper questions.
Sapolsky's illustrations of his points are fascinating and enlightening (and often funny!). In "The Genetic War Between Men and Women," he writes about how the genes from the father of a species have one goal ("greater, faster, more expensive growth") while genes from the mother have another ("countering that exuberance"). The success comes in nature's ability to balance these goals: "The placenta is ... the scene of a pitched battle, with paternally derived genes pushing [the placenta] to invade more aggressively while maternally derived genes try to hold it back." He lists other examples of this balance in humans and other species. This view of nature and how reproduction is nurtured fascinated me and helped me to see things in a new way.
Sapolsky's topics are wide ranging, and the book reminded me a bit of Freakonomics in its tendency to turn its problem-solving focus on whatever issue crossed its path. For example, in the final section, he writes about the differences between the
religions of desert peoples and the religions of tropical peoples -- the former tend to have a single god with miltaristic iterations and few rights for women while the latter tend toward pantheism and matrilocal marital residence. "Most evidence suggests that the rain-forest mind-set is more of a hothouse attribute, less hardy when uprooted." I guess that's evident, but Sapolsky's writings on the topic, again, gave me a new way to look at something I hadn't considered before. In this book, he addresses game theory, gene mapping, musical tastes, gender-communication issues and neurogenesis with wit, clarity and insight.
I recommend this book if you're the least bit curious about your brain, your body, the natural world and the society in which you live.
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36 of 40 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
If you want someone to make you think....., January 9, 2006
This review is from: Monkeyluv: And Other Essays on Our Lives as Animals (Hardcover)
Like most people, I am inundated with new books and papers that need my attention.
But I always make the time to read anything that Sapolsky writes. This book is a collection of essays that show once again, that we have an extraordinarily brilliant iconoclast in our midst. Time and again he demonstrates that he is not afraid to say when he does not know something, but that he also uncommonly good at coming up with new questions and new solutions.
I suggest reading this at the rate of a chapter a day, and meditating on what you have learned: you will not regret it!
The whole thing is witty, unconventional and brilliant!
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