The action is mostly set at Rudge Hall, home to the obese miser Lester Carmody, & at Healthward Ho, a health farm run by ' Chimp Twist, along with his cohorts ' Soapy' & ' Dolly' Molloy. who were all previously encountered in Sam The Sudden (1925) & would return in Money in the Bank (1946).
Hugo Camody, Lester's nephew, & his friend Ronnie Fish, would appear later in Blandings Castle, home of Ronnie's uncle Lord Emsworth, in Summer Lightening (1929) & Heavy Weather (1933)
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The animals are fed up with Monkey's teasing, so they decide to teach him a lesson. Each time he begins to tease them, his words are suddenly whisked away
- Flying Fox drops a passion fruit on top of them; Toucan flies away with them; Jaguar's tail washes them away. Suddenly, Monkey realizes it's no fun at all playing on his own. But just as he's about to say 'sorry', Crocodile snaps up his word
- well, nearly. That's a word everyone needs!

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This fascinating collection of essays exposes us as the animals that we are while explaining behaviours that are deeply & recognizably human. The first section, ' Our Genes & Who We Are', focuses on our genetic endowment & the forces it creates in our lives, such as our need to seek out beauty. Another essay explains the invisible genetic warfare that takes place between men & women as they conceive a baby, which continues as the foetus develops.

The second part of the book, ' Our Bodies & Who We Are', ponders such diverse topics as why dreams are in fact dream-like; why we are sexually attracted to one another; why Alzheimer's disease tends to be a post-menopausal phenomenon; & why grandmothers buying groceries for their grandchildren are part of nature's Darwinian logic. In the third section, ' Society & Who We Are, ' Sapolsky takes his interdisciplinary curiosity out into the wilds of civilization & poses such interesting questions as when & why our preferences in food become fixed. Or, why do desert cultures tend to be monotheistic & sexually repressed whereas rainforest dwellers tend towards sexually-relaxed polytheistic cultures? Why do people from the lower economic classes have more health problems?

In each of these investigations, we see Sapolsky's brilliant mind synthesizing a wealth of research in a thoughtful, engaging way that satisfyingly reveals the enormous complexity of simply being a human animal.



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