Humans, however, wig out with regularity, and not only last the night but often stay wiggy for days and months. Sapolsky's certainly done his part -- he pushed a number of his helpers past the breaking point, he claims in "A Primate's Memoir," by making the same culinary mistake year after year: "Taiwanese mackerel in tomato sauce," purchased in multiple cases for provisioning his remote Serengeti outpost, which he has visited for prolonged periods over more than two decades to study the same baboon troop.

I'm at my beloved campsite with nothing to eat for three months but rice and beans and goddamn Taiwanese mackerel in tomato sauce with the bones that keep jabbing your gums with each bite. After three days of this, you're hallucinating about strawberry Pop-Tarts and Velveeta cheese food and Yoo-Hoo chocolate drink. But at least it was my decision, I keep telling myself. For the poor bastard hired to live out here, it slowly dawns on him that this is the grub for the duration. With the exception of people from the coast, or the lakes region, most Africans I've met seem a bit alarmed by fish to begin with ... So, each meal goes by, the man sitting and watching with Bantu stoicism as yet another can of mackerel is opened, the distressing shploooog of tomato sauce spraying out, the sickening sucking noise of the fish plopping out of the can, the glint of cartilage. Slowly, the guy begins to go to pieces.

And who could blame him? Yet Sapolsky himself -- surprisingly, given some of what he's gone through over the years -- managed to keep his wits about him. It helped that he was already kind of a nut -- the sane kind -- when he set out for Africa fresh from the university and more or less clueless.

"Does Africa have some special quality that makes people go around the bend?" I asked him. "It's a combination of the place pushing one over the edge more readily, coupled with [the fact that] it's not random who is chosen to go there," he told me, referring to the type of white scientist who might gravitate toward months of self-imposed seclusion on the African savanna. "There are definitely a bunch of social or antisocial dimensions -- no doubt me included. In terms of Africans themselves, it's hard to say. Part of it is that in a very novel place, eccentric ways of behaving look even more eccentric."

	A Primate's Memoir: A Neuroscientist's Unconventional Life Among the Baboons By Robert M. Sapolsky Scribner 304 pages Nonfiction Print story E-mail story

"The camp guys probably also went mad because it was a crummy job," Sapolsky writes in the book.

You're a Kenyan farm kid, trying to get some cash, and suddenly you have to live in the middle of nowhere with some white guy. It's basically pretty scary. I eat weird stuff, have strange habits, talk marginal Swahili. My skin changes color in the sun, and then big chunks of it come peeling off. Richard [one of Sapolsky's more stable assistants] admitted after endless questioning from me that we white guys smell kinda peculiar. To add to the problems, I have a large beard and a lot of bushy hair, which definitely gives the heebie-jeebies to Africans. And the goings-on in camp do not help, with half-awake baboons lurching around and crates of dry ice and liquid nitrogen belching smoke and everything covered with baboon piss and baboon blood and baboon shit.

At least one reviewer sniffed disapprovingly at Sapolsky's insistent jocularity in "A Primate's Memoir" (some passages are not just funny, they're very, very funny, hysterical even; he's the secret love child of Hunter S. Thompson and Jane Goodall, P.J. O'Rourke on scriptwriting duty for Animal Planet), yet his over-the-topness is what makes his writing such an invigorating hoot, while reminding us that much of what's happening on this chaotic rock is tinged, if not suffused, with disordered-to-the-core madness, a realization that somehow makes even the grimmest reports (and life in general) bearable.

Sapolsky isn't just a writer; he's also a scientist, a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University, a research associate with the Institute of Primate Research, National Museum of Kenya, and the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation grant. His baboon research focuses on the dominance ranking among troop members, and what effect their social behavior and individual personalities may have on stress-related diseases. According to his page on the Stanford Web site, his laboratory "was among the first to document that sustained stress can damage the hippocampus, a region of the brain central to learning and memory," and he's been associated with numerous other discoveries and the use of innovative techniques in the field of neuroendocrinology. In other words, his offhand observations about baboons and humans are not as offhand as they may seem. What's more, perhaps because pathos is humor unplugged, Sapolsky conveys the appalling (a devastating T.B. plague among his troop; a visit to the side-by-side graves of Dian Fossey and her beloved gorilla Digit, both of whom were murdered) and the transcendent (his love for his wife) with as much emotional resonance as the funny stuff.

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