Jane Goodall: The Woman Who Redefined Man - Hardcover

Dale Peterson is the coauthor with Jane Goodall of Visions of Caliban (a New York Times Notable Book and a Library Journal Best Book) and the editor of her two books of letters, Africa in My Blood and Beyond Innocence. His other books include The Deluge and the Ark, Chimpanzee Travels, Storyville USA, Eating Apes, and (with Richard Wrangham) Demonic Males. They have been distinguished as an Economist Best Book, a Discover Top Science Book, a Bloomsbury Review Editor's Favorite, a Village Voice Best Book, and a finalist for the PEN New England Award and the Sir Peter Kent Conservation Book Prize in England. He resides in Massachusetts.

*Starred Review* Born in England in 1934, the eldest daughter of a marvelously competent mother and a race-car-driver father, Jane Goodall was a contemplative child who loved animals and Doctor Doolittle books and possessed, as Peterson, her first biographer, astutely observes, "high energy, a natural and happy competitiveness, a capacity for intense and extended concentration, a surprising attraction to risk, and an unusual tolerance for physical stress," qualities that proved essential to her uniquely demanding and influential life as a pioneering field scientist and international activist. Biographies of the living are tricky, but Peterson, who collaborated with Goodall on Visions of Caliban (1993) and edited her two letter collections, makes judicious use of sources both archival and human. And Goodall, as beautiful as she is brilliant and intrepid, learned more than 40 years ago-when the visionary paleontologist Louis Leakey set her (then a secretarial-school graduate) on the path to scientific discovery-that to bring her knowledge about animals to the world, she has to feed people's curiosity about herself. And what a story of poise, conviction, and sacrifice Peterson tells, from Goodall's revelatory relationships with the chimpanzees of Gombe along Lake Tanganyika to her struggles for funding and autonomy, her many suitors and two difficult marriages, and her arduous work to portray chimpanzees as complex individuals with minds and emotions akin to our own. Peterson vividly and significantly enriches our understanding of Goodall as a scientist, spiritual thinker, and humanist. Donna Seaman
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