The Trouble With Testosterone

The Trouble With Testosterone and Other Essays on the Biology of the Human Predicament is a collection of articles that originally appeared in Discover and The Sciences. Robert Sapolsky, the author, is a Stanford neurologist who spends three months each year studying wild baboons in the Serengeti. Many of his primate observations are rather interesting, such as the baboons who started gathering food from a garbage dump, which provided more readily available nourishment than they were accustomed to, with both positive and negative health consequences. Another essay analyzed the psychology of the firing squad, in which no individual shooter can take definite responsibility for the prisoner’s death, and how people approach probabilistic events. Other essays were less rewarding, mainly because they covered material I had seen before. Sapolsky is an effective popular science writer; each selection was readable, informative, and connected in some way to our daily lives.