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My Life with the Chimpanzees by Jane Goodall: book review


My Life with the Chimpanzees (1988, revised edition 2020) is the autobiography of Jane Goodall, the first person to study chimpanzees in the wild – in Tanzania.

 

Goodall begins with her childhood in England and her life amongst nature and animals. Her first trip to Kenya at the age of 23 was for three months, before returning at the age of 26 to work at the Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania for British anthropologist Louis Leakey (1903-1972). 


Leakey was noted for hiring three female researchers who became well-known primatologists in their own right: Jane Goodall (1934-) in Tanzania, studying chimpanzees, Dian Fossey (1932-1985) in Rwanda studying gorillas (‘Gorillas in the Mist), and Birute Galdikas (1946-) in Borneo studying orangutans.


This is about Goodall’s early work from 1960 onwards. She writes of her mother joining her, and her marriage in 1964 to Hugo van Lawick, a Dutch wildlife photographer hired by the National Geographic Society to photograph the chimps. She writes of the birth of their son Hugo Eric Louis Lawick (‘Grub’) in 1967 and compares his growth with the growing family of chimpanzees. 


There are lots of black and white photographs in the book. Hugo and Jane separated when Grub was seven years old in 1974, and Grub went to school in England. Her second marriage in 1975 to Derek Bryceson, director of Tanzania’s national parks, ended in 1980 when he died of cancer.


The first edition is followed by an update in 2020 to mention her conservation work and the establishment of her Roots and Shoots program. 


It is essentially a quick overview of Goodall and her work – there is not a lot of detail, and it can be read in a few hours. Nor is it scientific, emotional, well-written, or eloquent. Instead, it is a steady, even-keeled account of events in her life that doesn’t embellish all the work she has done for the past sixty years, and her name in history. She has written many more autobiographical accounts, as well as stories and children’s stories, so this is but a drop in the primate sphere of her long life with apes. 











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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author  of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce  (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

 

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