Jane Goodall: The Woman Who Redefined Man

Jane Goodall: The Woman Who Redefined Man by Dale Peterson Houghton Mifflin Company; $35.00

Books about celebrities are a peculiar subspecies of biography, presenting a distinct literary challenge even to the most expert writers. The general contours of their subject's lives are well-known, but readers want more than a simple recital of dates and accomplishments. Everyone knows that Jane Goodall is the "chimp lady" who spent years crouched in the African jungle recording the doings of primates at Tanzania's Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve. Those of us who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s may recall her as a lanky, khaki-clad figure whose articles in National Geographic revealed the hidden complexities of ape society, and made us envious of her adventures. Over the years, like other celebrity naturalists (E.O. Wilson comes to mind), she mellowed into an eloquent elder spokesperson for the conservation movement, establishing preserves for endangered apes in Africa and traveling the world with an urgent message of environmental stewardship.

Those are the bullet points in the life now addressed by Dale Peterson, author of several books about wild primates (one in collaboration with Goodall) and editor of Goodall's letters. Those connections have given him unparalleled access to his subject, who is still very much alive and kicking. And Peterson uses it to good advantage to convey how a young woman with little higher education could come to Africa, establish herself as one of the foremost experts in animal behavior, and rise to prominence as an environmental guru.

Gumption and genius clearly played major roles. Goodall took it on herself to save up her secretarial pay so she could hop a boat to Kenya in 1957. She took charge of every situation, impressing people everywhere with her intensity and her wit. She also seemed to have a natural ability to blend into the scenery and sit motionless for hours, a talent that enabled her to get closer to her ape "informants" than any previous observer.

It also did not hurt to have a smart and powerful mentor, Louis S.B. Leakey, whom Goodall met on her very first trip to Africa. Leakey, an eminent naturalist and anthropologist who was hot on the trail of human origins, gave Goodall the idea of studying chimps as a way of understanding how primate behavior might have evolved. It was Leakey who sent Goodall to Gombe, raised the funding for her early work, acted as an adviser and publicist, and even sponsored her doctoral studies at Cambridge.

Others have also played big roles in her success: her lively and supportive mother, two husbands--the photographer and cinematographer Hugo von Lawick and the conservationist Derek Bryceson--and numerous students and colleagues at Stanford University.

Peterson is an expert guide to the territory. He leavens his narrative with well-chosen descriptions of Goodall's work (which she has written about at much greater length herself, notably in her 1986 book, The Chimpanzees of Gombe). He includes an informative discussion of her paradigm-breaking discoveries of chimpanzees as sophisticated tool makers and meat eaters.

But perhaps because of his closeness to his subject, one senses in Peterson a bit more reserve about the back story of Goodall's career, the stuff readers really want to know about her celebrity life. There are some revealing passages on Goodall's relations with her husbands, but a good deal less about the kidnapping of four students by rebels from Zaire (now Congo) in 1975--which seems to have put an end to the carefree atmosphere of research at Gombe. Peterson covers the succeeding three decades in a scant 120 pages.

Yet if one leaves this book feeling full while oddly hungering for more, that's not entirely the fault of the author. A life this large cannot be encapsulated in a single book or described from a single vantage point. Peterson's take on Goodall may not be the definitive life history, but it is surely the informative first of many.

LAURENCE A. MARSCHALL, author of The Supernova Story, is W.K.T. Sahm Professor of Physics at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, and director of Project CLEA, which produces widely used simulation software for education in astronomy.

COPYRIGHT 2006 Natural History Magazine, Inc.
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