This very readable book was a lot more about the chimpanzees than I expected, and a lot less about Jane Goodall than I wished. I suppose that tells you something about this amazing woman. In the early 1960s Goodall, barely out of secretarial school and recruited by Louis Leakey, eagerly went into the Tanzanian forest to watch these fascinating animals for what was supposed to be six months of observation. She was told she need a chaperone, so she brought her mother. Later, the National Geographic photographer who would become her husband arrived, and the rest is history: Half a year turned into decades of passionate research and advocacy.

The book, which came out in 1977, focuses on the chimpanzees' often fascinating behavior: birth, parenting, childhood, play, mating, friendship, dominance and social structure, illness and death. I admit I found myself frequently distracted by the seemingly inappropriate level of contact Goodall and her assistants had with the chimps. True, without the banana feeding stations, they would not have been able to observe even half as much as they did, but the stations clearly distorted the chimps' natural feeding behavior. Still, one can't complain, since until that point no one had attempted anything close to Goodall's groundbreaking work.