This book was absolutely amazing, Jane Goodall is my hero. I learned a lot about chimpanzees that I only dreamed of (or seen in the Planet of the Apes franchise). It made me realize that we need to protect our closet relatives and I now want to study anthropology because of this book.

Important work that changed the way we see animals, important stuff. I understand it was written many decades ago but oddly enough, there are some wildly sexist comments made by Goodall herself. I wonder what she'd have to say now.

I was very pleasantly surprised by this book!

I'm not really sure how or why this book was in my personal library, perhaps from a garage sale or thrift store long ago, and don't have a particularly strong reason as to why I chose this as my next read. I think it amounted to it wanting to branch out a little (eh? ehhhhhh?) from the astronomy / human space exploration / technology / psychology non-fiction topics I typically choose from, I had seen Dr. Goodall quoted in some recent article, and I was knee deep in an online calculus class and needed to give my mind something to chew on that didn't involve quite so many numbers.

However, I quickly went from mild curiosity to being completely fascinated by the lives of the chimpanzees documented by the world's-most-famous-scientist.

Now, the format I'm most familiar with when it comes to nature documentaries is some TV show on the Discovery Channel, perhaps with David Attenborough's voice narrating, watching it on a lazy Saturday afternoon. Or finding a freebie Amazon Prime documentary primarily to check the display quality and vivid colors of a new TV or computer monitor. But somehow I found these text descriptions of the chimps with occasional blurry black and white pictures intermingled within the pages to be more engaging than any video. When Dr. Goodall described how infant chimps will ride on their mother's backs, or cling underneath her chest with their little faces poking out upside down, well, I felt like I could see that better in my own mind better than any 4K production could have done.

Perhaps it was her personal relationships to the chimps, and being the world's leading expert on the subject matter that made the descriptions much more interesting than a voice narrating what was happening on screen.

It was interesting to not just reading how the chimps developed over time, but how Jane (and her husband Hugo) also grew along with their research methods. It was funny at first reading how they were feeding and touching the chimps, and I couldn't help but think "Directly interacting with your research and altering their behavior? Oh man. Well, I guess you were the first on the scene, and that was several decades ago in the early '60s, so I suppose I can forgive you..." only to see her eventually come to the conclusion later that maybe those very actions weren't such great ideas and they in turn adjusted the manner they conducted their observations.

It was fun too, how the author would often explain "After quite a few observations we concluded chimpanzees acted in a certain particular manner given certain cirumstances, but then we would see instances where their behavior directly contradicted this so we're not sure on that one yet." An example being that there certainly appears to be a social pecking order in chimp communities where some chimps lord over all and get whatever they want, except in the circumstance when another chimp makes a kill hunting and the alpha has to beg them for meat scraps along with all the others. So there are unspoken rules they live by.

It was difficult finding myself caring about individual chimps, later reading about a few succumbing to polio and flu outbreaks (chimps are susceptible to many of the same diseases humans are), or a couple that were just one day never seen again yet were survived by their offspring, now anxious and depressed.

I highly applaud Dr. Goodall's research and conservation efforts, and look forward to read from the many works she has published since In the Shadow of Man.

3.5

I love reading about people who have spent time living in the wild, observing animals, and Jane Goodall is inspirational. I cannot wait to continue reading about her chimps!