The structure of this book is the whole trick, and once I understood it the length stopped bothering me. Sapolsky takes one human behavior and asks what caused it at every possible remove, what fired in your brain one second before, what hormone primed you minutes before that, what happened in your childhood, what your culture trained into you, what your species evolved toward over a million years, and he works backward chapter by chapter until you’ve got the whole causal chain laid out. It is, structurally, one of the more elegant nonfiction books I’ve read in years, buried under an amount of citation that will absolutely wear you down if you try to read it fast.
Don’t try to read it fast. I split it into chunks over about a month, which is apparently a common strategy, and it’s the only way the density stays fun instead of punishing. His voice helps enormously, there’s real charm and humor here that survives even the most technical stretches, the kind of writing that makes you forgive a paragraph you had to reread three times. My one real quarrel, and it’s one I’ve seen other people land on too, is that he spends the whole book building the case that free will is mostly an illusion and then doesn’t fully reckon with what that means for his own repeated calls to action, to go change the world. I don’t think that contradiction sinks the book, I think it’s the honest unresolved seam in an otherwise extraordinary argument.
Five stars, heaviest book on my shelf in every sense, and worth every one of the weeks it took.