Why do we do the things we do?
Over a decade in the making, this game-changing book is Robert Sapolsky’s genre-shattering attempt to answer that question as fully as perhaps only he could, looking at it from every angle. Sapolsky’s storytelling concept is delightful but it also has a powerful intrinsic logic: he starts by looking at the factors that bear on a person’s reaction in the precise moment a behavior occurs, and then hops back in time from there, in stages, ultimately ending up at the deep history of our species and its genetic inheritance.
Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert Sapolsky cheap now on Kindle
“Cheap now on Kindle” – I’ll say – $1.99! I’ve delightfully devoured everything written by Sapolsky, so of course I bought this. But my goodness, the hard copy is 800 pages long – and even if I wasn’t already currently reading five books in parallel, I doubt I’ll live long enough to ever again make it through an 800-page novel, uh I mean, non-fiction tome of this size.
Still, given the horror that is human Behav(ior) “at Our Best and Worst” – which I witness and feel overwhelmed by every single day – this is, for me anyway, a more suitable read than the last “excellent horror” book you recommended, “The Historian” by Elizabeth Kostova. Thank you very much, but there are limits even to my masochism.