Most months, I semi-randomly pick one of my wife's books to read; back in November, that brought me to this biography of Jane Goodall to read. Given she had just recently passed (and I had a student writing about her in my research class), this seemed quite timely.
Jane Goodall: The Woman Who Redefined Man |
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Published: 2006 Read: November 2025 |
The book came out in 2006, so two decades before Goodall died, but my feeling is that it's probably definitive enough and unlikely to be surpassed, with almost 700 pages of content covering her life. I really only knew Goodall's deal in the broadest of strokes: she studied chimpanzees with a somewhat new technique. Here, you get that all laid out in detail that is quite thorough but never tedious, from her childhood to her time in Gombe to her shift into advocacy. Peterson paints a portrait of a deeply empathetic woman, whose empathy took many forms. Her work in Gombe is particularly detailed,* but I found it all quite fascinating, and I read this long, dense book in just a few days. So many interesting things: her dad the racecar driver, her lifelong interest in Africa, her almost falling into the research project, the details of how she set up her research project and kept it going, her fledgling writing career and how she was used by National Geographic, the attack on her research project by terrorists.
One thing I did not really expect was the sheer number of married men who would hit on her during her time in Africa, but it came to make sense; Jane was so open and empathetic in everything she did, and that clearly caused these lonely men to grab onto her. But it was the same empathy she extended to chimps, and that drove her activism later in life; it was all manifestations of same phenomenon.
* Peterson devotes almost 300 pages to Jane's life in the 1960s, so about thirty pages per year of her life. By comparison, just over 100 pages to the 1970s, and only about 40 pages to the 1980s. He clearly spends time where it needs to be spent, but I did feel that Jane's personal life largely dropped out of the narrative after the death of her second husband. Did she ever find or pursue love again? What did her son get up to? I would guess these things were probably too sensitive and recent to discuss while she was still alive. My guess is it wouldn't take too much to update this book to cover the remaining two decades of her life; I wonder if that will happen.
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