Books finished in August:
(Warning: reviews are unpolished and quickly written.)

Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (2016) by Frans de Waal. de Waal’s perhaps biggest point is the continuity of abilities between humans and other animals, and he makes the case well for a wide range of abilities, like memory, forward looking behavior, problem solving, tool use, various social skills, and animals (in particular apes, monkeys, birds, elephants). That is perfectly plausible to me, so I did not need convincing on that point, but I was fascinated by the ways other animals, in particular chimps, do better than humans on some traditional cognitive tasks. Examples are the extremely quick memory of chimps (short video, a little longer) and the fact that chimps may remember solutions to tasks/puzzles years later once they have learned it. A quibble: de Waal often appears unnuanced when writing about other fields, and sets up straw-men to argue against, which is not that interesting. Recommended.

Ratings and old books are in the library.