![]() ![]() ![]() She discusses a failed marriage and her tense relationships with colleagues. Pepperberg recounts her own childhood, revealing that her parents were emotionally distant and controlling. During their thirty years together, Alex could never be her pet, but he was also never just an experimental subject. This sets the stage for Pepperberg to admit that she struggled, throughout Alex’s life, to maintain the emotional distance from him necessary for scientific objectivity in her work. The book is framed by the story of Alex’s death: “How much impact could a one-pound ball of feathers have on the world? It took death for me to find out.” Pepperberg relates the experience of reading Alex’s obituaries in mainstream newspapers, pointing out that many people who never met Alex were touched by his intelligence and personality. Alex & Me is a personal memoir, focusing less on Pepperberg’s findings and more on her relationship with Alex. According to Pepperberg, Alex demonstrated the intelligence of a two-year-old human at the time of his death, the highest level of intelligence exhibited by a non-human animal. It recounts her thirty-year experiment with an African Grey parrot named Alex (short for “Avian Learning Experiment”). Alex & Me: How a Scientist and a Parrot Discovered a Hidden World of Animal Intelligence - And Formed a Deep Bond in the Process is a 2008 memoir by American animal-intelligence researcher Irene Pepperberg. ![]()
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