A review of Alex & Me, by Irene M. Pepperberg
232 pages
MJF Books, 2008

“He’d sometimes say ‘You tickle,’ and bend his head so I could scratch his face. As I did, the white area around his eyes turned a subtle pink, blushing as Greys do when being intimate. His eyes would squint almost closed.”

How often pet owners must fantasize that their cat or dog will tell them, in speech, to initiate a favorite belly rub. But Alex the African Grey Parrot was not a pet. He was a science experiment. Despite that, or perhaps because of it, Alex packed plenty of personality into a pound of feathers. Upon his death in 2007, he was mourned not only as a television star but as a scientific icon. Irene Pepperberg, an associate research professor at Brandeis University who teaches animal cognition at Harvard University, had worked with Alex for thirty years, teaching him a limited vocabulary of English words, which he used to interact with humans and his surroundings. She chronicles their journey in her book Alex & Me, first published in 2008.

Alex could label keys (with which he liked to scratch himself), wood (a favorite object to nibble), corn, nuts, and much more. He even had some sense that the words he used were made up of individual sounds and could “spell out” some of them, even unprompted. Sometimes, he even coined new words, like “banerry” for apple, a combination of banana and cherry. He could identify several different colors and use them to label objects he had never seen before. Alex’s abilities extended to the mathematical realm as well. He could count to seven, do simple addition, and even seemed to have a concept of zero. Even more amazingly, he learned how to say “I’m sorry” to diffuse tense situations and was a master at manipulating the students who trained him into giving him extra treats. In short, he was a bird of many talents who demonstrated that several mental abilities thought to be unique to humans were in fact also latent in the avian brain.

Pepperberg’s book is a loving memorial to a bird who changed the popular view of what non-primate brains are capable of. Along the way, she highlights Alex’s achievements in the context of what she was trying to test. It soars when Alex stars, like in the above passage when his requests for human touch lighten Pepperberg’s darker moments.

The book opens at the close, reporting in detail on the reaction in the media and the public to Alex’s death. From Chapter 2 onwards, the book takes a chronological path through Pepperberg’s (and Alex’s) life.  She relates her early attachments to birds, including a budgie that is her first pet. The only child of second-generation American parents, she feels socially isolated by her distant mother and hardworking father. But when No-Name the budgie arrives in her life, she feels a deep connection. Lest the unnamed feathered friend and his successors influence her choice of career too soon, Pepperberg instead turns to studying chemistry as an undergraduate at MIT and a graduate student at Harvard. It is not until she is deeply unsatisfied with her doctoral work in theoretical chemistry that she returns again to problems of animal cognition, and sets off, in her first postdoctoral research, to study language and cognition with the help of Alex in spare lab space at Purdue University. Together, she and Alex would successfully test the theory that learning how to communicate requires social interaction. Until that point, most animal cognition studies had kept their subjects in isolation and starved them until they gave the right answer, leading to results that suggested non-human animals were less cognitively capable than the researchers testing them.

The book continues to follow Pepperberg’s career as she—and Alex—traipse across the country in search of a permanent position, from Purdue to Northwestern to the University of Arizona to a brief stint at the Media Lab at MIT and finally a lab at Brandeis with teaching duties at Harvard. Along the way, she places her work in the context of studies of animal cognition, which at the time were coming under fire for flaws in study design and, as Pepperberg argues, an inherent bias among some scientists and linguists that many of the capacities that Alex would demonstrate along the way should be unique to humans. After reaching Alex’s death for a second time, at its logical chronological position, Pepperberg ends the book with ruminations on what the abilities of Alex and his fellow parrots mean for animal cognition and our understanding of language.

Although Pepperberg has had many media appearances, Alex and Me is her first attempt at a popular science book of this length. She explains the rationale behind many of her tests with Alex to some extent, but often after a preface of “bear with me,” “I’ll describe it in more detail later,” or “I don’t want to get bogged down.” Her diction, in selections like these, lends the book a conversational feel, but occasionally comes across as talking down to the reader. It is sometimes frustrating that the science is not present in greater depth; on at least one occasion, she refers the reader to her earlier book The Alex Studies, an academic take on her research with Alex over the years that reads more like a collection of her scientific papers than a popular book. In other places, oddly, she expects the reader to be well-versed in the achievements of various animal cognition experts, dropping their names and expecting their fame to precede them.

Occasionally, she makes leaps that don’t seem grounded in scientific endeavor—assigning emotions to her parrots, or directly comparing her (often negative) reception by her scientist peers to her open-armed embrace by the media and the general public. She paraphrases the rejection of her first grant proposal as “they asked me what I was smoking,” without quoting from the document itself, something she does later with a different grant proposal. The reader is not necessarily inclined to disbelieve her, but outside substantiation from peers, rather than just the media, would strengthen her case. Her depiction of the sexist and unfriendly Harvard chemistry department, however, is completely believable, if only from personal experience. (Thirty years after she was there, a generally jovial elderly male professor in the department told a female undergraduate student “not to worry her pretty little head” about a problem she had asked a serious question about.) Still, many of the book’s stylistic flaws seem forgivable because it is really meant to be a memoir rather than a thorough explanation of the science.

The writing is generally clear and functional, although it could be less jarring in places. The language veers very occasionally into the slightly maudlin in describing her grief for Alex, and the phrase “mindless automaton,” to describe the prevailing view of animal cognition that Pepperberg and Alex fight against, is overused. The first chapter, in particular, suffers from too many examples of the personal and media reaction to Alex’s death, before the reader even knows much about who he is. A few carefully chosen anecdotes would have served better to create an emotional impact. Still, the tales of Alex’s behavior drive the rest of the book quite successfully. There must have been many momentous occasions in his life under observation, and the reader feels that Pepperberg has selected only the very best—the funniest, the most touching, the most illustrative—to share.

Pepperberg insists early on that she maintained a professional relationship with Alex, and that she kept an objective view of her bird until she realized, after his death, how deeply she cared for him. In the 2009 Harper Paperback edition of the book, a book club discussion question on the final page asks whether this assertion really seems true. Pepperberg has described her exasperation with Alex when he refuses to cooperate, her sadness that he cannot come home with her again after one incident where he cowers in fear after seeing owls outside her house, and her panic and worry when Alex develops a lung infection, decades before his death, that requires him to live at the vet’s office for many weeks. She is clearly concerned for his welfare, not just as the object of her life’s work, but as a colleague and a friend. Once, when she asks for “cork nuts,” Alex’s word for almonds, at the grocery store, she excuses herself by saying, “oh, that’s what my child calls them.”

She may have fooled herself that she views Alex and his achievements objectively, but she fails to delude the reader. Still, that doesn’t cast doubt on the quality of her science or the momentous nature of Alex’s abilities. In fact, her feelings for Alex lend color to her description of his accomplishments and create an emotional tug at his death that is much greater than she could have managed by merely describing her own grief. All the highs and lows of their relationship manage not only to depict his importance in the field of animal cognition, but also emphasize that, together, woman and parrot embarked on an incredible scientific journey. Science may be about objectivity, but it is the passion for the research—and in this case, the feathered research subject—that makes reading about a career unfolding worthwhile.