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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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