The story of animals that lived happily in the jungle. The baboons seemed to be the happiest animals in creation. One day the impalas asked them to be quiet to please the other animals. They soon realized that a quiet jungle was boring and asked the baboons to bring life back to the jungle.

Eugene Marais spent three years living in the South African wilderness in close daily contact with a troop of baboons. He later described this as the happiest, most content time of his troubled life. This period produced two works which are testament to his research and conclusions; they have very different histories. Firstly, there was a series of articles written in Afrikaans for the newspaper Die Vaderland. They were then published in book form under the title Burgers van die Berge, and were first published in an English translation in 1939 under the title My Friends the Baboons. These pieces were written in a popular vein suitable to a newspaper readership, and were not regarded seriously by Marais himself. They are a journal; a series of anecdotes and impressions. The Soul of the Ape, which Marais wrote in beautifully clear and precise English, was the more serious scientific document; however after his death in 1936, it could not be found. It was lost for 32 years, and was recovered in 1968, and published the following year. The excellent introduction by Robert Ardrey that is included in this volume was part of the 1969 and subsequent editions of The Soul of the Ape, and adds greatly to an appreciation of its importance. Together, these three texts give us as complete a picture as we will ever get of Marais’ three year study of these complex relatives of humanity, and its implications for the study of consciousness.

Fourteen-year-old Gerry Copeland has mixed feelings about flying back to his parents’ research camp in the African savanna. While his biologist mom and dad study baboon behavior, he’ll be thinking about the video arcade and restaurants back in the city. Suddenly, their small plane’s engine stutters and dies. They go down hard. Gerry wakes up thinking a baboon has broken his fall. He’s shocked to realize the furry arm is his own. Somehow, he’s become one of the beasts his parents are studying. Gerry’s only chance is to stay with the baboon troop. His parents don’t recognize him and he begins to lose hope he’ll ever be human again. His final, desperate bid to turn back means giving up the animal family he’s come to care about for the human family where he truly belongs. BABOON is the riveting story of one teenager’s journey into the heart of the baboon world, where he confronts terrifying attacks by predators and humans, threatening behavior within the troop, and the day-to-day struggle to survive.

What is there against a Baboon's Left Testicle? And before you all scream "The right one of course!" I feel duty bound to inform you that, in this case, you would be mistaken, for our baboon has suffered a most intimate and injurious injustice - his right testicle has been wrenched from its furry pouch by a person, or persons, unknown in order to fulfil a long held prophesy and set afoot plans for world domination. And herein lies the confusion in our tale - does the offending scrotal raider have the right one for the job or is it the wrong one, being the right one? Set alongside this an unlikely group of misfits - including some completely oblivious newly-weds, a 200 year old, dead, gay, unidextrous pie maker and his curious short arsed lover by the name of Gerard O'nad, a murderous army of Welsh zombies and an all stitching, all dancing counter-army of equally murderous Pearly Kings and Queens and you have an almighty pile of baboon excrement - but an equally almighty 'bloody good read!'

This memoir recounts the author's cathartic eight-month, 10,000-mile voyage across the Pacific Ocean in a thirty-two foot boat.

In the tradition of Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey, Robert Sapolsky, a foremost science writer and recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant, tells the mesmerizing story of his twenty-one years in remote Kenya with a troop of savanna baboons. "I had never planned to become a savanna baboon when I grew up; instead, I had always assumed I would become a mountain gorilla,” writes Robert Sapolsky in this witty and riveting chronicle of a scientist’s coming-of-age in Africa. An exhilarating account of Sapolsky’s twenty-one-year study of a troop of rambunctious baboons in Kenya, A Primate’s Memoir interweaves serious scientific observations with wry commentary about the challenges and pleasures of living in the wilds of the Serengeti—for man and beast alike. Over two decades, Sapolsky survives culinary atrocities, gunpoint encounters, and a surreal kidnapping, while witnessing the encroachment of the tourist mentality on Africa. As he conducts unprecedented physiological research on wild primates, he becomes enamored of his subjects—unique and compelling characters in their own right—and he returns to them summer after summer, until tragedy finally prevents him. By turns hilarious and poignant, A Primate’s Memoir is a magnum opus from one of our foremost science writers.