Author: Robert M. Sapolsky
Format: Hardback (board colour: white with spine in black, silver lettering). Dust-jacket. Plain cream endpapers. Size: about 14.4cm W x 22.1cm H x 2.4cm T. Pages: 288.
Publisher: Scribner - Simon & Schuster, Inc.
ISBN: 0-684-83409-X
Status: New

Contents page

Dust-jacket notes about this book and its author:
 
FRONT FLAP:
 
In the tradition of Stephen Jay Gould (Dinosaur in the Haystack) and Oliver Sacks (An Anthropologist on Mars), the author of Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers offers a sparkling and erudite collection of essays about science, the world, and our relation to both.
 
In The Trouble with Testosterone, Robert M. Sapolskv draws from his career as a behavioral biologist to interpret the peculiar drives and intrinsic needs of that most exotic species - Homo sapiens. With candor, humor, and lush observations, these essays marry cutting-edge science with a rich and compassionate humanity.
 
Sapolsky's book ranges broadly over the web of life, studying its details and plotting its themes. "Curious George's Pharmacy" examines recent exciting claims that wild primates know how to medicate themselves with forest plants. "Junk Food Monkeys" relates the adventures of a troop of baboons who stumble onto a tourist garbage dump. "Poverty's Remains" claims that science is as riddled with metaphors as a Shakespearean sonnet. "Measures of Life" begins as a witty analysis of firing squads and concludes as a dazzling meditation on the roles and responsibilities of scientists. And in the final essay, the brilliant and penetrating "Circling the Blanket for God," Sapolsky shows that science and religion emanate from the same place: the human brain. These pieces, then, reveal the contradictions that confront those who describe the world objectively, those who try to reconcile the truths of the mind with the burdens of the heart.
 
Vivid, playful, brimming with insights, and compulsively readable, The Trouble with Testosterone illuminates the interconnectedness of the world's inhabitants. Rarely has science been written about with such skill and flair.
 
REAR FLAP:
 
A native of New York City, Robert M. Sapolsky holds degrees from Harvard and Rockefeller Universities. He currently is professor of biology and neuroscience at Stanford University. His previous book, Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. In 1987 he was awarded a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant." A regular contributor to Discover and The Sciences, he lives with his family in Stanford, California.
 
REAR COVER:
 
"Robert M. Sapolsky" is one of the best scientist-writers of our time, able to deal with the weightiest topics both authoritatively and wittily, with so light a touch that they become accessible to all. In The Trouble with Testosterone, he tilts against reductionism and oversimplification of every sort, and what emerges in these brilliant, wide-ranging essays is a rich picture of human individuality and how it is both constrained and liberated by biological fate." - Dr Oliver Sacks, author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and An Anthropolgist on Mars.
 
"With uncommon expertise and insight, Robert M. Sapolsky explains the relation of biology to complex properties of human behavior. His perspective, carefully based on scientific research, is both unsettling and liberating." - Edward O. Wilson, Pellegrino University, Professor at Harvard University and author of The Diversity of Life.

• Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers: A Guide to Stress, Stress-related Diseases, and Coping.
• Stress, the Aging Brain, and the Mechanisms of Neuron Death.