2024 the best non-fiction books review

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The New York Times best seller.

From the celebrated neurobiologist and primatologist, a landmark, genre-defining examination of human behavior, both good and bad, and an answer to the question: Why do we do the things we do?

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 evolutionary legacy.

And so the first category of explanation is the neurobiological one. A behavior occurs - whether an example of humans at our best, worst, or somewhere in between. What went on in a person's brain a second before the behavior happened? Then Sapolsky pulls out to a slightly larger field of vision, a little earlier in time: What sight, sound, or smell caused the nervous system to produce that behavior? And then, what hormones acted hours to days earlier to change how responsive that individual is to the stimuli that triggered the nervous system? By now he has increased our field of vision so that we are thinking about neurobiology and the sensory world of our environment and endocrinology in trying to explain what happened.

Sapolsky keeps going: How was that behavior influenced by structural changes in the nervous system over the preceding months, by that person's adolescence, childhood, fetal life, and then back to his or her genetic makeup? Finally, he expands the view to encompass factors larger than one individual. How did culture shape that individual's group, what ecological factors millennia old formed that culture? And on and on, back to evolutionary factors millions of years old.

The result is one of the most dazzling tours d'horizon of the science of human behavior ever attempted, a majestic synthesis that harvests cutting-edge research across a range of disciplines to provide a subtle and nuanced perspective on why we ultimately do the things we do...for good and for ill. Sapolsky builds on this understanding to wrestle with some of our deepest and thorniest questions relating to tribalism and xenophobia, hierarchy and competition, morality and free will, and war and peace. Wise, humane, often very funny, Behave is a towering achievement, powerfully humanizing, and downright heroic in its own right.

Reviewer: A. Menon
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Comprehensive overview of behaviour and its origins
Review: Behave: The Biology of Humans at our Best and Worst is a comprehensive overview of ways to think about the causal mechanisms involved in human behavior. This is of course a massive subject that is still poorly understood despite large strides made in the lace century. Robert Sapolsky tackles the root causes of behavior through multiple lenses to give the reader a sense of how our minds work. This book is not easy and the material it covers is from many technical subjects which are then interwoven. But for the interested reader this is a pretty remarkable achievement as one gets an overview of human nature from a combinatorial lens of primatology, neuroscience, behavioral economics, biochemistry, psychology among other subjects. Such an attempt would seem impossible for almost any author, but this book largely achieves its goals.Behave is split into 17 chapters in which each chapter effectively thinks about behavior on a longer time scale, starting with immediately before to getting to evolutionary origin. The author starts by posing questions on how our behavior originates. The first 5 chapters highlight this point and the author discusses topics from how the neuroscience of decisions works to how our the neural architecture is laid through our experiences. There is a lot of technical material which can be tough to follow, but there is an appendix which helps clarify the subject for those less familiar. Nonetheless Chapter 2 discusses the various parts of the brain and aspects of their evolution and has a lot of detail but is a core reference chapter for later in the book. The author then starts getting into hormones and regulation and how they impact our actions, there is a lot of discussion of myths and facts and one gets a sense of how complex the interactions are. The author discusses the adolescent brain and how it is still very much in development. Ideas like how accountable are youths get's discussed, these kinds of questions are posed and re-discussed throughout. The author discusses how the environment can influence behavior and some epigenetic ideas are discussed along side general brain development. The author discusses the basis of our political nature as well, in particular how people categorize other people and have internal Us vs Them delineations. How we frame who is an us and who is a them though is extremely variable and our characterization of groups is deemed to be largely constructed rather than innate. The author discusses how different societies have different levels of social interactions and consequentially how different people think about interacting with strangers depends heavily on how much social capital their respective societies have. The author discusses hierarchies and brings in his primatology expertise and discusses how different ape families manage their hierarchies and stress associated with such systems. Human hierarchical systems are discussed in this contexts and the author highlights that our current capitalistic hierarchical society is all new relative to hunter gatherer systems. The author discusses our systems of morality and where they originate; the author looks at cases of high generosity and discusses what parts of the brain were involved. There are lots of interesting facts to be read in these chapters, really fascinating material. The author discusses things like empathy and sympathy and how too much empathy gets in the way of prudent action. It is the dispassionate observer who ends up being more helpful on average. The author revisits the criminal justice system and discusses the deep flaws in how we might be thinking of right and wrong and responsibility; there are useful ideas to consider when thinking about policy. The author ends up by discussing our propensity for violence and war overtime. There are some great anecdotal stories from recent world wars on reconciliation as well as front line behavior when people weren't considering the enemy a them.Behave is a pretty remarkable book. It is a combination of material from so many subjects, all of which are non-trivial, and it is put together remarkably well. For those interested in how people can behave, where our behavior comes from, what time scales are involved in our propensities and how flexible our responses are this is a must read. One should get a sense of optimism from this, despite science's progress on understanding behavior, we are nowhere close to claiming we have strong causal mechanisms that took a person from point a to b. There are correlated variables and we have some indication on where propensities come from but one still has room for individualism in this book. Very informative, very impressive.

Reviewer: Kindle Customer
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Comprehensive review of human behavior science
Review: In this amazing book, Sapolsky covers the biology of human behavior in a very comprehensive manner. The author groups the subject in two parts. In the first one, he starts presenting what happens one second before the observed behavior and continues to go back in time until the point where he discusses the evolutionary aspects of human behavior. In the second part of the book, Sapolsky then explains the consequences of what he presented in part one in several aspects of human behavior. The author did a comprehensive research of the topics covered, and the book is full of references. It is not an easy book to read, despite the effort of The author to write it in a less technical way. It's a very good read for anyone interested in understanding the biology of human behavior.

Reviewer: Nidia Cortes
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Enlightening for the novice!!!
Review: It is clear, although you need a fast contextual update to enjoy it!! The nice tone and style together with the scientific link made this book very useful to me!!!!

Reviewer: B. Johnson
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title: More is Not More; Less is More
Review: I have no quibble with the 5 star reviews so far. I want to caution you about what you are getting into.You can learn a lot about how and why we “behave” just from the organizing model he employs to sequence the chapters in the book. This is also the recurring analytical framework he uses to present each chapter introduced on page 6:A behavior has just occurred. Why did it happen?We can learn a lot by zooming out through the time sequence preceding this event.What went on in your brain seconds before that behavior? (Chapter2)What sensory stimuli (sight, sound, smell, etc.) activated those brain processes in the seconds and minutes just before? (Chapter3)What hormones were activated hours and days before the stimulus that primed the sensory receptors? (Chapter4)What features in the environment in the prior weeks and years changed the structure and functions of those hormones and environmental stimuli? (Chapter 5)What nurturing events during childhood development (Chapter 6), fetal development (Chapter 7), and genetic makeup (Chapter 8) influenced the prior chain of factors that produced that behavior?What external cultural factors (Chapter 9) and ecological factors (Chapter 10) shaped that culture?This "zoom out" approach is much more insightful than "zooming in" by disciplinary perspectives. This is Sapolsky's most valuable insight. This approach integrates the views of varying academic disciplines and helps readers integrate information from prior sources.I bought Behave on the day it was released, based primarily on an effusive recommendation in the Wall Street Journal that day. Now that I have read the book, I cannot highly recommend it myself.By coincidence, I was about half way through Johnathan Haidt’s The Happiness Hypothesis when Behave arrived. In the first few pages, I could see the overlap. My advice is to read Haidt’s version because he makes all the same essential points in 1/3 as many pages, using many of the same arguments and sources, takes a more balanced approach, seems to be politically neutral, and is easier to read by a logarithmic magnitude. And the same wisdom is half the price.Sapolsky is a biologist who writes like a biologist. Although many of his numerous footnotes are witty and/or informative, his basic style is to (1) set up a strawman argument he wants to refute, (2) provide 20 to 30 pages to extremely dense biologist minutia, and then, voila! (3) states his main point in one nicely pithy sentence. The problem is, as the old joke goes, you have to be a persistent and patient optimist to find the pony in this pile of … biologist dogma. On many occasions, I was unable to see the value of slogging through the ever-mounting stack of evidence cited in numerous research details that are presented over 20-30 pages to make a sub-point or to take a snipe at some other scientific discipline. Haidt makes many of the same points in 1/10 the space. The points only Sapolsky makes, you will little note nor long remember, as one practitioner of pithiness observed.Proof that Saplosky has the ability to present dense material in a shorter space are the excellence shorter appendices on Neuroscience 101 (28 pages), The Basics of Endocrinology (4 pages), Protein Basics (7 pages). Contrast these with his 51 pages of Notes, which the publisher chose to present in 4- point type to keep them under 100 pages at 10-point type. There are important signals in these comparisons.Also, from the outset, I was put off by a sixth sense that his not-so-hidden agenda was to convert us unwashed masses to his neo-progressive worldview through deep Baptism in the Holy waters of contemporary biological doctrine which largely follows the scientism philosophy.My best advice: Put Behave in your bookcase or on your desk as a totem of your intellectual adventures and read Haidt so you can answer questions about what you got out of reading Behave. Thus applying the key message in Behave.

Reviewer: lj
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: I used to be the team leader of a behaviour program. One of my mentors brought my attention to this book. I immediately bought it and found the comprehensive overview it offers so refreshing and relevant that it became a mainstay when I mentored others. I am no longer sure how many copies I have purchased and loaned out, but I am only pleased to facilitate the skills of anyone in the business of caring.

Reviewer: No tengo
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Es un libro maravilloso siento que ahora puedo explicar con presión muchas de mis conductas y entender a los demás, cualquier persona que tenga la oportunidad debería leerlo.

Reviewer: Akhil Mohan
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Fair warning: this book is not for everyone. It’s over 1000 pages long, extremely complicated, full of qualifications and nuances, frequently transitions from one topic to the next, and makes you forget almost as much as it makes you learn. But if you can see it all the way to the end, you deserve to feel proud. This book is an encyclopaedic crash course in neuroscience, sociobiology, philosophy and human morality all rolled into one massive treatise seeking to answer the question: do we humans take decisions of our own free will or does our biology and genealogy do it for us? Are we even responsible for our best and worst behaviours; how can we enhance the former and suppress the latter? Predictably, there is no easy answer but Sapolsky provides both the templates and the catalysts to help answer the question as objectively as possible.His erudition, width and depth of knowledge - and the welcome doses of riotous humour - make him as good an author as he is scientist. One wished he did not complicate every issue with a near-infinite supply of opposing, qualifying and modifying examples - even when they are not always central to the theme under discussion - as it leaves one reeling at the end as to what conclusion to actually draw. It does become clearer as you progress but the process would be more friction-less if the author just recognised that most of us (lay people) can’t actually swim underwater. That apart, this is just a delightful book - full of powerful examples, glittering pearls of knowledge, and those indescribably joyous explanations when something you have always ‘known’ turns out to have a deep, scientific basis. It is also a somewhat encouraging book, as far as the future of our species is concerned, as Sapolosky tries to show that over the centuries and millennia of human existence our best behaviours are becoming more common and ubiquitous and our worst ones a little less so.It cannot be ignored however, that global events over the last 5-7 years, since this book was written, are proving somewhat contrary to this premise. There are wars in several regions of the planet, time-honoured institutions like the UN, WTO, ICJ underpinning the practices of so-called “anonymous pro-sociality” are crumbling, Us-Them dichotomies are widening, we seem to be losing the fight against climate change, and so on. Hopefully, some of them will prove to be just temporary wrinkles in an otherwise upward path. If not, Dr Sapolsky will have to produce a revised edition!

Reviewer: Ed
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Prof. Sapolsky knows how to write a book with deep insights about the complex biology of human behavior in a very engaging and interesting tone.

Reviewer: Claudia Z.
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: *Behave* by Robert Sapolsky is an insightful and comprehensive exploration of human behavior, diving into the complex interplay of biology, psychology, and social factors that shape why we act the way we do. Sapolsky’s writing is engaging and often humorous, making complex scientific concepts accessible to a broad audience. The book covers a vast range of topics, from neuroscience to sociology, offering a nuanced understanding of human behavior. However, the sheer depth and detail can be overwhelming at times, making it a dense read. Despite this, *Behave* is a fascinating and enlightening book that offers profound insights into the human condition. Highly recommended for anyone interested in understanding the science behind our actions!