Completed: Walking with the Great Apes: Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, Birute Galdikas

To be fair, I finished this book several weeks ago. I just haven't gotten around to blogging it. But I realized looking back that it really looks like I've read very little since September, and it looks that way because it's true.

I've been slowly eliminating TV shows from my PVR, no longer recording ones that I really won't miss. I've been trying to read, at least a bit, every day before bed. And I try to read during my lunch break, though some days that just doesn't happen!

Walking with the Great Apes was fascinating. The four main characters really do read as though they were (are, for two of them) larger than life. Richard Leakey, patriarch of African palaeoanthropology, playboy, scholar and personality. The man who selected three women to study the great apes - two of whom were not even trained in a relevant subject. He believed that women would be better able to empathize with the great apes - better able to understand them.


Jane Goodall - free spirit, kind, spiritual, patient adventurer. Fearless. Even in her old age, she travels more than any of her staff, who work in shifts to keep up with her. As a young woman, she was beautiful, serene, a perfect person to act as a bridge between the human psyche and that of the chimpanzees of Gombe.

Dian Fossey - passionate, psychologically unstable, loner, angry, bitter Nyiramachabelli (read the book for the explanation of the last word). Dian came from an unhappy childhood and lived an unhappy adulthood. Although she loved the gorillas, she slowly removed herself from humanity. Hers was a sad life, despite its many accomplishments.

Birute Galdikas - gentle but utterly firm, commanding and yet soft-spoken. She was the only one already a grad student before being selected by Leakey, and the only one to remain in academia proper.

All three sacrificed marriages and relationships, health and wellness, time, money and comfort, for their dreams. Dreams that Leakey helped to foster but that each woman embraced with all their hearts. The "three primates" have become three of the most influential and well-known women in science, and they caused paradigm-shifting changes in the field of primatology. Crusader (Jane), Sorceress (Dian) and Diplomat (Birute) - truly miraculous women. Well worth a read.

Title: Walking with the Great Apes: Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, Birute Galdikas
Author: Sy Montgomery
Pages: 239

Total books blogged: 6
Total pages: 2,387