Jane Goodall

by Peterson, Dale

• ISBN13: 9780395854051
• ISBN10: 0395854059
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-11-15
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Summary

When Louis Leakey first heard about Jane Goodall's discovery that chimps fashion and use tools, he sent her a telegram: "Now we must redefine tool, redefine man, or accept chimpanzees as human." But when Goodall first presented her discoveries at a scientific conference, she was ridiculed by the powerful chairman, who warned one of his distinguished colleagues not to be misled by her "glamour." She was too young, too blond, too pretty to be a serious scientist, and worse yet, she still had virtually no formal scientific training. She had been a secretarial school graduate whom Leakey had sent out to study chimps only when he couldn't find anyone better qualified to take the job. And he couldn't tell her what to do once she was in the field- nobody could-because no one before had made such an intensive and long-term study of wild apes. Dale Peterson shows clearly and convincingly how truly remarkable Goodall's accomplishments were and how unlikely it is that anyone else could have duplicated them. Peterson details not only how Jane Goodall revolutionized the study of primates, our closest relatives, but how she helped set radically new standards and a new intellectual style in the study of animal behavior. And he reveals the very private quest that led to another sharp turn in her life, from scientist to activist.

Author Biography

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.

Table of Contents

Prologue	ix
PART I: The Naturalist
1. Daddy's Machine, Nanny's Garden
1930-1939	3	(16)
2. War and a Disappearing Father
1939-1951	19	(10)
3. A Child's Peace
1940-1945	29	(9)
4. Child in the Trees
1940-1951	38	(15)
5. Childhood's End
1951-1952	53	(14)
6. Dream Deferred
1952-1956	67	(14)
7. Dream Returned
1956-1957	81	(11)
8. Africa!
1957	92	(15)
9. Olduvai
1957	107	(15)
10. Love and Other Complications
1957-1958	122	(12)
11. The Menagerie
1958	134	(15)
12. London Interlude
1959-1960	149	(18)
13. Lolui Island and the Road to Gombe
1960	167	(12)
14. Summer in Paradise
1960	179	(15)
15. David's Gift
1960	194	(18)
16. Primates and Paradigms
1960-1962	212	(17)
17. The Magical and the Mundane
1960-1961	229	(16)
18. A Photographic Failure
1961	245	(16)
19. A Different Language
1961-1962	261	(20)
PART II: The Scientist
20. First Scientific Conferences
1962	281	(14)
21. A Photographic Success
1962	295	(18)
22. Intimate Encounters
1963	313	(19)
23. Love and Romance, Passion and Marriage
1963-1964	332	(11)
24. Babies and Bananas
1964	343	(11)
25. A Permanent Research Center
1964-1965	354	(18)
26. Gombe from Afar
1965	372	(15)
27. A Peripatetic Dr. van Lawick and the Paleolithic Vulture
1966-1967	387	(16)
28. Epidemic
1966-1967	403	(12)
29. Grublin
1967	415	(16)
30. Promise and Loss
1968-1969	431	(18)
31. Hugo's Book
1967-1970	449	(16)
32. Regime Changes
1970-1972	465	(19)
33. Abundance, Estrangement, and Death
1972	484	(19)
34. Friends, Allies, and Lovers
1973	503	(20)
35. Things Fall Down—and Sometimes Apart
1974	523	(18)
36. Domesticity and Disaster
1975	541	(21)
37. A New Normal
1975-1980	562	(19)
38. Picking Up the Pieces
1980-1986	581	(20)
PART III: The Activist
39. Well-Being in a Cage
1986-1991	601	(18)
40. Orphans, Children, and Sanctuaries
1986-1995	619	(20)
41. Circumnavigations
1996-2000	639	(13)
42. Messages
2000-2003	652	(18)
43. Woman Leaping Forward
2003-2004	670	(19)
Notes	689	(15)
Works Cited	704	(8)
Acknowledgments	712	(3)
Index	715

Excerpts

I Daddy's Machine, Nanny's Garden 1930-1939 Mortimer Herbert Morris-Goodall was a member of the prosperous middle class, a status his family had acquired during the previous century as a result of initiative, industry, luck, and playing cards. According to family tradition, some ancient Goodall experienced a more than passing association with the gallows, as either a hangman or hanged man; but the family's more reliable record starts with the birth of Charles Goodall, on December 4, 1785, in the town of Northampton. By the early 1820s, Charles had finished his printer's apprenticeship in London and struck out on his own as a small-scale manufacturer of playing cards and message cards. Business was good, and he moved into progressively larger premises until he built a factory at 24 Great College Street. By this time the concern was known as Charles Goodall & Son. After Charles's death, in 1851, his sons, Jonathan and Josiah, began expanding operations, building more factory space, purchasing new high-speed color presses, and diversifying their line to include almanacs, ball programs, calendars, Christmas greeting cards, menu cards, memorial cards, New Year's and Valentine and visiting cards - and playing cards. The company trademark consisted of the name Goodall split in half, stacked four letters over three, and placed inside a heart: GOOD ALL By 1913, Charles Goodall & Son was printing, packaging, and selling over 2 million packs of playing cards a year, roughly three times the production of all other manufacturers combined, and by 1915 sales had reached 2.2 million. The two Goodall brothers now running the company, Charles's grandsons, together took three quarters of the net profits, while a third brother, Reginald - the youngest - having been given no responsibility for running the company whatsoever, was forced to remain content with the final quarter of net profits. Reginald may have been a prodigal son, and after he married Elizabeth Morris, against the family's wishes, he proceeded to give all their children a hyphenated last name - Morris-Goodall - as if to make a point. He made the point five times before falling off a horse at the Folkestone Race Course in Kent and landing on his head, producing a cerebral blood clot that, on May 3, 1916, proved fatal. Mortimer Herbert was nine years old at the time of his father's death, and in the years following that unhappy moment the family moved a number of times, eventually settling down when his mother married again. Her new husband, the imposing Major Norman Nutt, DSO (who was said to have led a charge during the Great War by standing on top of a rolling tank and waving his sword), or Nutty, as Mortimer called him, managed the Folkestone Race Course. As an astonishing perquisite of the job, Major Nutt and his family were allowed to move into an ancient manor house built inside the ruins of an even more ancient castle owned by the Folkestone track. By then, however, Mortimer was off to Repton, a public school in Lancashire, where he proved an indifferent scholar. After Repton, he studied engineering and eventually took a job with Callender's Cable and Construction. Callender's had contracts for laying telephone cables all over England, and Mortimer would go around with a test phone to see that the cables were joined up correctly. "That was very interesting," he once recalled, "and it involved traveling and driving the test van, which was right up my street: I love driving." Driving was his life 's dominating passion. His mother taught him to drive when he was fourteen years old, and by his l