With the recent death of the world-renowned anthropologist, Jane Goodall, I decided to tackle Jane Goodall: The Woman Who Redefined Man by Dale Peterson, a 755-page biography that has been on my to-be-read pile for eons. I have followed Goodall’s life since I was in my teens and considering becoming an archeologist and working in the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. As much as I adore Jane, I had mixed feelings about this encyclopedic biography. First, it begins way back in 1785 and continues through the family’s playing-card business and her father’s race car driving career, so there is far more verbiage leading up to Jane than I was really interested in. Second, there were numerous excerpts from Jane’s childhood diaries, one or two of which would have been sufficient. Third, Peterson spends an inordinate number of pages giving the history of ethology—(the study of animal and human behavior and social organization from a biological perspective) with its roots in the works of Charles Darwin and other scientists in the late nineteenth century and the modern discipline beginning in the 1930s with scientists like Konrad Lorenz—and positioning Jane within that milieu. Having studied experimental psychology and read extensively on these subjects, I felt they got in the way of my learning the psyche of the “real” Jane.
That said, once Dr. Goodall meets Louis B. Leakey and later arrives in Gombe, Tanzania, where she studies chimpanzees, I could scarcely put the book down. I found the development of Gombe and other African centers for the studies of chimpanzee, gorillas, bonobos, and baboons fascinating. I also enjoyed reading of Jane’s gradual movement into conservation, her own vegetarianism and spiritualism interesting. Overall, with a fair amount of skimming, I enjoyed the book.
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Jane Goodall: The Woman Who Redefined Man (Mariner Books, August 18, 2023) is available through:
Your local independent bookseller | Amazon | Barnes & Noble
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