Visions of Caliban: On Chimpanzees and People - Softcover

For the last 35 years British biologist Jane Goodall has been living among African chimpanzees, recording their behavior and explaining it in a number of fine books. With literature professor Dale Peterson, Goodall here looks at the place of chimpanzees in the popular imagination, from Shakespeare's play The Tempest (whence the book's title) to David Letterman's monkey-cam, while Goodall recaps her work among chimps and decries their probably unhappy future. As she tells us in chilling detail, the chimpanzees' rain forest habitat is on the decline due to consumption of fuel wood as well as industrial logging, and chimps are thus threatened with extinction. The authors even wonder whether, given the relentless destruction of the chimpanzees' home, the poor creatures might not be better off in zoos. Peterson's and Goodall's point-counterpoint makes for fascinating, if somber, reading.

Jane Goodall was a young secretarial school graduate when Louis Leakey sent her to Tanzania in 1960 to study chimpanzees. She later received a Ph.D. from Cambridge University and has become one of the world's most honored scientists and writers. Jane Goodall's research on chimpanzees has been described by Stephen Jay Gould as "one of the Western world's great scientific achievements." Her books include the recent REASON FOR HOPE, IN THE SHADOW OF MAN, and THROUGH A WINDOW. She is the co-author with Dale Peterson of VISIONS OF CALIBAN. She resides in Tanzania.