Beyond Innocence by Jane Goodall, edited by Dale Peterson, Houghton Mifflin,
$28, ISBN 0618125205
POSTAL workers everywhere must love Jane Goodall. Since setting off for
Africa as an ambitious 22-year-old, the now-famous chimp watcher has sent
thousands of letters. Luckily, the recipients by and large kept what she wrote.
Editor Dale Peterson turns almost 2 million of her words into a book.
It鈥檚 a clever way to produce an instant autobiography, and an appealing one
at that. After all, reading somebody else鈥檚 post has an intrinsic voyeuristic
appeal. But in Jane鈥檚 case, there鈥檚 more: this woman has clearly lived an
interesting life. Jane writes vividly and with enthusiasm.
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She has a child, watches the chimps suffer a polio epidemic, survives a plane
crash, falls in love with a married man, gets divorced and marries him. Some of
her Gombe students are kidnapped by terrorists, another is killed in a fall, and
then her second husband dies of cancer. And as if all that weren鈥檛 enough, she鈥檚
forced to acknowledge the dark side of her beloved chimps, as one group wipes
out its neighbours. She even braves the biomedical establishment by exposing the
abysmal treatment of lab chimps.
Fund-raising is a constant concern. Included are drafts of two finely crafted
begging letters to pop star Michael Jackson. Wonder if he kept them.