The bonobos have found their advocate.
A bright, informative memoir of a young woman’s first encounters with love, marriage and the world’s most endangered ape.
Journalist and research assistant Woods took a romantic plunge in her late 20s, joining her fiancé Brian on his quest to discover what makes us human by studying bonobos, a species of chimpanzee found only in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The couple worked and lived at the resort-like Lola ya Bonobo, a former presidential retreat that is now the world’s only sanctuary for orphaned bonobos, located in Kinshasa, the Congo capital. There, she grew close to sanctuary founder Claudine Andre and the four women called the “Mamas” who care for the chimps, and gradually fell in love with the more than 60 trusting bonobos. The animals, which look just like chimpanzees and share 98.7 percent of human DNA, have been largely ignored by scientists and the media, except in the 1980s, when the primates were dubbed “the ‘make love not war’ hippie ape” after a researcher reported on their frequent sexual behavior. The bonobos—estimated at 10,000 to 40,000 in number—are frequently hunted for their meat. Woods writes candidly about playing with the animals while covered in feces and mango slime; squabbling with her new husband; and interviewing locals about the Congo’s recent history of warfare to better understand her estranged father, a Vietnam War veteran. When violence broke out in 2006, the author helped her husband study the bonobos, who live quite peacefully compared to the more pugnacious chimpanzees. Their research, covered in Time and elsewhere, suggests that bonobos cooperate better than chimpanzees because they are more tolerant of one another, and because they play and have sex a lot. Brian also discovered evidence of altruism, a human trait, in bonobos, leading Woods to observe that the primates share much that makes us human and may “hold the key to a world without war.”
The bonobos have found their advocate.Pub Date: June 10, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-592-40546-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 30, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
