Jane Goodall

September 11, 2006
In this engaging but overlong biography, Peterson (The Deluge and the Ark
) details the life of the woman who revolutionized primate studies. In 1960, at age 26, Goodall was sent by paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey to the Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve in Tanganyika (now Tanzania) to study the chimps. With no scientific training and no precedents to follow, but with plenty of courage and the conviction that chimpanzees have individual personalities, she lived with the animals. Patiently observing them, she discovered that they eat meat, engage in warfare and use tools—a revelation that persuaded Leakey that it was necessary to redefine "man," because the use of tools had always been thought to be uniquely human. Peterson provides colorful descriptions of day-to-day life at Gombe and Goodall's interaction with the chimps, and ably portrays her relationship with Leakey, the National Geographic Society (which sponsored much of her work), her two marriages, her reaction to her celebrity and her ventures as an activist for the well-being of chimpanzees in captivity and the wild. However, exhaustive details of Goodall's childhood, her youthful loves, the activities of her infant son and the lives of her students and fellow researchers become wearisome. 16 pages of photos not seen by PW
.