Window umbrella

 Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves by Frans de Waal
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Mama’s Last Hug tells us about animal emotions and reminds us that we are only animals ourselves. I picked up this book from Harari’s book recommendations. And this one won my heart.

We are so busy with our lives, trying to update ourselves like the android phones, communicating with people from different languages and timezones, we have almost forgotten that each of us has a body. That we are animals and nothing more. And that, emotions is not our species’ super power, rather that, it is too, a very much animal character.

Mama’s Last Hug starts with the farewell of an alpha female chimpanzee, Mama. In chimpanzee colonies around the world, behavior scientists observe their behaviors and study them. Sometimes you can better understand yourself when you are observing others. It happened to me too, I found my own species' characters so similar to the constant drama, politics, competition of these chimpanzees. It was like, woah, animals have the typical society too!

The book goes deep into emotions. Emotions say a lot that language fails to present. I nodded with these words from the author-

Many of us now use smiley or frowny faces to punctuate text messages, which suggests that language by itself is not as effective as advertised. We feel the need to add nonverbal cues to prevent a peace offer from being mistaken for an act of revenge, or a joke from being taken as an insult. Emoticons and words are poor substitutes for the body itself, though: through gaze direction, expressions, tone of voice, posture, pupil dilation, and gestures, the body is much better than language at communicating a wide range of meanings.

From this book I learned a lot of things. Very basic things that I think everyone learns without recognizing. We just forget them in the process of being ‘civilized’.

The author was very bold. Throughout the book he provided many references and they were so interesting that I followed a few references to know the details more. I will keep another quote that shows how simply Van gets to touch our viewpoint-

Scientific skepticism about pain applies not just to animals, therefore, but to any organism that fails to talk. It is as if science pays attention to feelings only if they come with an explicit verbal statement, such as “I felt a sharp pain when you did that!” The importance we attach to language is just ridiculous. It has given us more than a century of agnosticism with regard to wordless pain and consciousness.

If you like to read Harari, I think you will love it. Even if you are not, you can go for it. You will definitely explore something about yourself reading this book.


View all my reviews