Sapolsky grew up in Brooklyn, and brings a wise-cracking, quirky sense of humor to his serious subject matter. Even with these scholarly bona fides, he aims his book at the general reader-or at least the general reader prepared to tackle a very long book. Sapolsky is a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University and a 1987 awardee of the MacArthur, or “genius,” Fellowship, as it’s called. Like Diamond’s “Guns, Germs and Steel” or “Collapse”, “Behave” is an interdisciplinary work that pulls in evolutionary biology, neuro-science, social and behavioral psychology, anthropology, ethics, and ethnology in examining, as its subtitle puts it, “humans at our best and worst.” Sapolsky’s subject is violence, and the book is a tour de force in drawing upon so many different forms of evidence from so many fields in trying to explain as complex a phenomenon as aggression in human society and animal groups. “Behave” has a lot to offer social studies teachers.

Having been so captivated by the audio version of Sapolsky’s book, I bought the book, which runs to nearly 800 pages (Penguin Press, 2017), so I can return to it as a resource in my teaching. This summer we opted to read “Behave” by Robert M.

Over the years, we’ve especially enjoyed listening to books by John McPhee and Jared Diamond-significant works of considerable scope in time and place-that lend themselves to this kind of listening experience.

Although it’s lovely having more time for extended conversations, when we’re in the car for hours we also like to listen to books-on-tape, which can help distract us from the frustration stemming from the inevitable traffic jams arising from having so many people traveling when all the road repair work is going on. This summer my husband and I had a couple of long road trips.

Robert m sapolsky books