Review

In his introduction to Jane Goodall's new book, Africa in My Blood, editor Dale Peterson notes that with the possible exception of Marie Curie, Goodall "must be the most widely celebrated woman in science."

Goodall, despite stepping back from firsthand research on chimpanzees more than a decade ago, clearly remains one of the most respected, even idolized, women in or out of science. Goodall, now 66, travels relentlessly, lecturing to sold-out auditoriums in what seems an almost desperate attempt to save the dwindling jungle habitats on which chimp colonies depend.

But her "gloss of celebrity," Peterson says, carries a price, for it may have "dulled the luster of her actual accomplishment." Goodall, he continues, has "been presented as the little girl who thought she could; the sweet Ophelia who dreamed of animals; the feisty feminist in a man's world; the ironic traditionalist in a woman's world; the inspired nurturer; Mother Teresa of the apes; [and] Tarzan's better half." While each of these images is based in some truth, he says, "they contribute to a larger untruth, an inappropriate devaluation of what she has actually done."

Africa In My Blood, a collection of Goodall's letters from childhood through her first six years of work in Africa, makes clear just what she did after arriving at the Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve in Tanzania in July 1960. What seeps out of the letters, particularly the earliest ones from Gombe, is Goodall's quiet but ferocious dedication to the task she has set for herself.

In her first weeks in Gombe, Goodall spends her time crawling and climbing alone through a dense jungle she knows little about, looking for the elusive chimps. She rarely mentions danger, although her environment is filled with poisonous snakes, including the spitting cobra, black mamba, and bush viper, poisonous eight-inch long centipedes (one appeared under her pillow), tusked bush pigs, cape buffalo (which treed her several times), and the occasional leopard.

There she was, with no formal training, scrambling through the jungle, sometimes nearly naked for comfort in the heavy rains, searching for chimps. The beauty of these letters is that they discuss the adventures as casually as if Goodall was back in her hometown of Bournemouth, England, looking for a lost horse.

The letters make clear that, even from childhood, Goodall was strong-willed, yet there is very little pretension. "Did Mum tell you how many chimps I've been finding, up behind our own mountain." Goodall wrote to her "darling family," on August 30, 1960, just weeks after arriving in the jungle. "I've discovered more - since my fever [she had already been stricken with malaria] - in about five days, than in all the dreary weeks before. I've seen them walking along paths, I've seen them resting under trees, I've seen them playing . . . and, down in one of the cool river valleys I saw just a little baby, peering at me, and then he was joined by the most hideous female with jet black face and beetling brow ridge. She was huge."

During her first year in Gombe, Goodall made two of her most important discoveries: that chimps eat meat, and that they use tools, primarily sticks to fish termites out of mounds. She habituated the chimps to her presence by lying for hours on the jungle floor, barely moving while the chimps moved around her - hooting, grunting, and in one electric moment, touching her hair.

In 1961 she discovered the chimp "rain festival," in which she saw "primitive hairy men (the chimps), huge and black on the skyline, flinging themselves across the ground in their primaeval display of strength and power. And as each demonstrated his own majestic superiority, the women and children watched in silence, and the rain poured down while the lightning flashed brilliantly across the grey sky."

These letters, quoted as written - bad grammar and spelling included - reflect the personal side of Goodall. Some were scrawled on scraps of paper as she lay on hilltops under a polyethylene sheet in drenching rains. Others were written in the glow of a kerosene lamp in her tent after her scientific journal had been completed.

Her scientific journals, now kept at the University of Minnesota, are mostly straightforward notes on the behavior of the chimps. It is in her letters that Jane Goodall, the unorthodox woman not yet known to science, emerges.

"Can you begin to imagine how I felt?" she wrote to her family after observing the rain festival. "The only human ever to have witnessed such a display, in all its primitive, fantastic wonder? I fear I was not able to report it as exactly as science might wish."