Scan barcode
A review by etirabys
Through a Window: My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of Gombe by Jane Goodall
4.0
A little clunky on a sentence level sometimes, but if you want hundreds of pages of Jane Goodall talking about chimp behavior / social organization / child development / ingroup-outgroup differentiation – which I ABSOLUTELY DID – this is for you. Minimal veering into the author's life, which I appreciated.
My least favorite parts: the occasional bland philosophical musing (love, evil, etc), and what I consider overinterpretation of chimp emotions – I agree with JG and think it's highly probable chimps' emotional lives greatly resemble humans, but I found myself getting tetchy every time she claimed chimp X was feeling kinda specific emotion Y. (Interacts with a lab animal, looks into his eyes, and says that there was no resentment, only gratitude at being played with, etc.)
My least favorite parts: the occasional bland philosophical musing (love, evil, etc), and what I consider overinterpretation of chimp emotions – I agree with JG and think it's highly probable chimps' emotional lives greatly resemble humans, but I found myself getting tetchy every time she claimed chimp X was feeling kinda specific emotion Y. (Interacts with a lab animal, looks into his eyes, and says that there was no resentment, only gratitude at being played with, etc.)