Walking with the Great Apes, by Sy Montgomery* (Houghton Mifflin, 1991, 280 pp, $9.95) Review by Skye Anderson (an updated version of this book appeared in 2009 with a forward by Elizabeth Thomas**) Review by Skye Anderson.
We spied Walking with the Great Apes at our favorite used bookstore and simply had to have it. Right now! Written by the gifted author Sy Montgomery about the three famous women who lived with chimps, gorillas and orangutans: we love to read about them every so often. We first reviewed Primates, a fun book about the three, in 2015, and My Life with Chimpanzees in 2019 so it's about time we brought attention to these great women scientists once again.
Walking with the Great Apes is a warm reading experience, one that we couldn't wait to get back to when interrupted. It was a familiar read, comforting yet exciting at the same time. We could so easily picture ourselves in the jungles with animals we had in stuffed form as children.
British Jane Goodall was a real rebel, convinced to get a PhD without a BS and the first ethologist to consider her subjects as individuals rather than just numbers and, yes, she named her chimpanzees.
Next in time, American primatologist Dian Fossey is almost as famous, perhaps as a result of the movie, "Gorillas in the Mist," (1988) starring Sigourney Weaver, and of her book by the same name and of her unfortunate demise.
Later and lesser known, for many reasons, was Canadian anthropologist Birute Galdikas who studied orangutans - and the people of Borneo.
All three received their initial funding from Louis Leakey who needs no introduction. All three lived for years in the wilds of their adoptive countries (Birute even married an Indonesian). Imagine being a 20-something graduate student or even someone who had never attended college, heading off to "darkest Africa," essentially alone - little food, rain so frequent that it rots your clothing, not knowing the language or customs or even how to go about finding the animals you are there to study, falling down, slipping in the mud, contracting malaria - and leeches!
The Guts
So, in time order are Jane, Dian, and Birute. You already know their animal of study and their location (from above). They all became environmentalists and created organizations: one named for herself (Jane Goodall), one named for an individual primate (Dian Fossey), and one named for the primate species she studied (Birute Galdikas) - this illustrates their differences. Birute also studied the people and culture of her study country while Dian fought hoof and nails with the poachers and government of her country (Rwanda) and was murdered perhaps due to the rift between two cultures. Jane became a citizen of the world. But we know the least about Birute, perhaps because she went to Borneo (where the heck is that?) rather than Africa.
Writing Style: Compare and Contrast
Author Montgomery uses simple English to relate profound stories and the reasons behind what these three women did and the results they achieved, their similarities and vast differences.
Montgomery has penned the penultimate story, almost a dissertation, of three women scientists, comparing and contrasting them but in a book that reads like fiction, yet, coming away, you will know their science and their methods amid their fund-raising trials and tribulations.
I usually like to keep, forever, my favorite books, which are only a handful each year. Walking with the Great Apes, however, is a book I want to loan out to many people, to spread the word. And, the next time I teach Biology 101, it will be on my reading list which only contains Double Helix so far.
*author of The Good Good Pig
and The Soul of the Octopus and others
** author of The Hidden Life of Dogs, The Social Life of Dogs, and The Hidden Life of Deer
