Wednesday, January 21, 2009

2009 book 17

Irene Pepperberg's Alex & Me
Sigh. I wanted to love this book, all about the famously smart parrot, but it was hard. The problem is that Pepperberg is really annoying and self-involved. I didn't care about her lonely childhood and her troubles getting a job (understandable, considering her Ph.D. is in chemistry and she decided to study birds on a whim). This book felt on some level like an excuse to get back at the scientific establishment that took so long to accept her research, whereas I was hoping for more stories about the birds. This story would have been much better served had it been written by a journalist and not an embittered scientist. B-/C+.

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