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Meet the Wild Things
For both Barack Obama and Jane Goodall, success in life seems to have come about through combining practical work with their most idealistic beliefs. For Obama, America’s forty-fourth president, it was the appeal of taming wild things; for the anthropologist, Goodall, it was Doctor Dolittle talking to the animals. In both cases, the idealism seems to have been planted in childhood by two very different children’s books. Ridiculous? Maybe not; psychologists often say it is at the most tender ages that ideas are planted and future paths are determined. So let’s consider first the deceptively simple case of Obama and Where the Wild Things Are.
Politicians seem to need to read books without actually having the spare time to do so. Studying the reading habits of presidents of the United States is therefore an activity that requires particular skepticism, especially as politicians’ words always seem to be carefully crafted for an ever-skeptical public audience. After all, is it really plausible that so many presidents from Abraham Lincoln down only loved the classics and rejected mere popular fiction, or is it more likely that they thought they should privilege the classics? Books are a more individual taste than that. I can well believe that Herbert Hoover, the engineer whose presidency started off with the Wall Street crash, kept himself stimulated and up to date with books on metallurgy. Yet, there too, I suppose that Hoover was projecting an image of himself as a political engineer.
Skepticism aside though, some presidents simply were book lovers, from Theodore Roosevelt, who consumed books at a rate of one a day, to Barack Obama, who not only reads voraciously but writes best sellers too.
Obama’s reading list offers plenty of texts that a president should be reading, like the writings of Abraham Lincoln, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela. Obama says that he found such books were “particularly helpful” when he needed a sense of solidarity, adding that “during very difficult moments, this job can be very isolating . . . So sometimes you have to sort of hop across history to find folks who have been similarly feeling isolated, and that’s been useful.”
Obama is a curious figure, though, and his claimed favorite books reflect that ambiguous side. Here we find two books of fiction feature prominently: Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, a ripping yarn that also deals with subtle issues of personal belief and political duties, and in very different vein, an illustrated children’s book, Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak.
As president of the United States, Obama needs only a little introduction—but he does need one nonetheless, not least because here is a man who started off, like so many remarkable figures, with little apparently in his favor. He was born on August 4, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii, to Barack Obama Sr. and Stanley Ann Dunham. She hailed from Kansas, and I don’t know why she was given a man’s name, but in any case she was always called Ann. His parents divorced, and Barack spent most of his childhood years in Honolulu being looked after by his grandparents while his mother attended the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Just before his fourth birthday, his mother married Lolo Soetoro, who was originally from Indonesia, and two years later she took the young Obama with her to that country. Later, Obama returned to Honolulu to attend Punahou High School, graduating in 1979, and it was at this point that he finally arrived in the mainland United States, to study at Occidental College, Columbia University, and finally Harvard Law School. In the process he worked at various times as a community organizer, lawyer, and college lecturer.
Of all these roles, publicly at least, Obama has made his organizing days central to his political identity. When he announced his candidacy for president, he said the “best education” he ever had was not at colleges or universities but rather the time he spent discovering the science of communities in Chicago. Indeed, Obama’s inspirational chant, “Yes, we can,” goes back to these days when he wished to inspire Chicago’s citizens and groups to realize their dreams.
The flip side of listening to others to help implement their life strategies is that you don’t develop one yourself. And indeed, in his superb 1995 autobiography, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, no particular philosophy is offered. Instead, Obama says he sought as a youth to reject the values he had been fed from “TV sitcoms and philosophy books.” It is a strange combination and a worrying aside.
Morality is also absent from his book The Audacity of Hope, with one exception—Obama refers to his work ethic not once but seven times! Apart from this, Obama presents himself simply as a technician, an organizer. He doesn’t seem interested in ethics or solving other grand questions. In fact, when asked for an opinion about the origins of life, he short-circuited the debate, saying that it was “above his pay grade”—a characteristic response that would be funnier if it hadn’t come from someone whose real life would include ruling on the ramifications of such matters.
Indeed, the Obama administration’s record seems to reveal a tin ear for ethics, by which I mean a preference to see issues in purely instrumental terms, with precedents set in terms of data privacy, citizenship, and, most brutal of all, the use of drones to target—even at great cost to innocent civilians—the United States’ enemies. (This is a point Malala Yousafzai would make years later to Obama—see chapter 10.)
It is all a far cry from the heady optimism of The Audacity of Hope, where Obama says, “What troubled me was the process—or lack of process—by which the White House and its Congressional allies disposed of opposing views; the sense that the rules of governing no longer applied, and that there were no fixed meanings or standards to which we could appeal.”
He even says that it was as if those in power had decided that constitutional limits “were niceties that only got in the way, that they complicated what was obvious (the need to stop terrorists) or impeded what was right . . . and could therefore be disregarded, or bent to strong wills.”
But back to the books he read. In a July 2008 interview that Obama gave Rolling Stone cofounder Jann Wenner shortly after his nomination as the Democratic candidate for the US presidency, Obama discusses both his plans and his influences in some detail. Asked to list three books that inspired him, he offers Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, the tragedies of William Shakespeare, and “probably” Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls.
For Whom the Bell Tolls is a war story based on the author’s observations (as a journalist) of the bitter civil war in Spain in the 1930s. It is full of gritty passages with a life-or-death flavor that appeal to the spirit of the Spanish Republicans in their ultimately futile bid to stave off the betterequipped fascist forces.
The title, by the way, comes from a much older poem by John Donne. It has become a popular aphorism, usually given as “Ask not for whom the bell tolls: it tolls for thee,” but when taken out of its original context like that, it loses a lot of the sense, which is about the shared values of humanity.
No man is an Island, entire in itself;
every man is a piece of the continent,
a part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were,
as well as if a manor of your friends or of your own were.
Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind;
and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
Perhaps Obama, ever the cautious speaker, thought it a dangerous choice. Yet later, in 2018, at the memorial service for Obama’s former presidential rival and frequent political adversary Senator John McCain—a memorial that dwelled at length on the Vietnam veteran’s patriotism and personality—Obama directly quoted the book, which was also said to be one of McCain’s favorites: “Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be. But what will happen in all the other days that ever come can depend on what you do today.”
That’s a great line for a politician, as is “There is nothing else than now,” which Hemingway has Robert Jordan, the hero in his book, say at one point, before continuing, “There is neither yesterday, certainly, nor is there any tomorrow. How old must you be before you know that? There is only now, and if now is only two days, then two days is your life and everything in it will be in proportion. This is how you live a life in two days. And if you stop complaining and asking for what you never will get, you will have a good life. A good life is not measured by any biblical span.”
However, Hemingway has more dramatic things than mere votes in mind, of course. As he explains a little later,
Dying was nothing and he had no picture of it nor fear of it in his mind. But living was a field of grain blowing in the wind on the side of a hill. Living was a hawk in the sky. Living was an earthen jar of water in the dust of the threshing with the grain flailed out and the chaff blowing. Living was a horse between your legs and a carbine under one leg and a hill and a valley and a stream with trees along it and the far side of the valley and the hills beyond.
“If the function of a writer is to reveal reality,” the literary editor Maxwell Perkins wrote to Hemingway shortly after reading the manuscript, “no one ever so completely performed it.” The publisher also described it as greater in power, broader in scope, and “more intensely emotional” than any of the author’s previous works and “as one of the best war novels of all time.”
Personally, though, I didn’t like it. I found it two-dimensional and unreflective, both in its tale of the antifascist guerilla unit in the mountains of Spain and the subsidiary tale of his love for the beautiful Maria. I can well imagine a soldier like McCain having found it a powerful read, but as an inspiration for Obama it has always seemed to me to strike a slightly duff note.
Instead, for me, Where the Wild Things Are speaks with more authenticity. And indeed, Obama makes much greater reference to this—on the face of it—less important text. Wild Things even features prominently in an interview Obama gave to the New York Times’ chief book critic Michiko Kakutani in the week before finally stepping down from the presidency, when he talks about the role that books had played during his presidency and throughout his life. Here, in a relaxed and unpretentious account, Obama describes how books guided him out of his turbulent and disconnected teenage years and helped him to figure out who he was, what he thought, and what was important. They also helped him at an earlier stage of what he calls a “peripatetic and sometimes lonely” boyhood when these “worlds that were portable” provided “companionship.” (Peripatetic? I had to look that up too. It means traveling from place to place. And although Obama insists he doesn’t do philosophy, the word originates as a description of Aristotle’s followers.)
Wild Things is a book that talks to a young boy, at odds with his mother, lost in the threatening jungle of life. Indeed, there is a video clip of Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, reading the storybook to their children on the White House lawn, complete with growls and claws, as part of the annual Easter Egg Roll. Obama can be found saying, “I love that book, and my wife still thinks that I’m Max: that I’m getting into mischief all the time.”
Pen drawing of an imaginary “wild thing” by Milo (who is, at the time, the same age as Max in the book).
The story, which consists of only 338 words, concerns a young boy called Max who, after dressing in a wolf costume, wreaks such havoc at home that he is sent to bed without his supper. However, Max’s bedroom then mysteriously changes into a jungle, and the boy winds up sailing to an island inhabited by vicious beasts. Far from being scared, though, Max faces down the creatures and ends up hailed as “King of the Wild Things” as well as enjoying a playful romp with his new subjects. Is there a revealing insight here into Barack Obama’s stint in Washington? And if so, what tricks might President Obama have borrowed from Sendak’s Max?
WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE
AUTHOR: MAURICE SENDAK
PUBLISHED: 1963
Although just ten sentences long, Where the Wild Things Are is considered by many as a masterpiece of children’s literature, inspiring operas, ballets, songs, and film adaptations. It is, however, quite an odd, even disquieting, book.
As the book opens, we find the hero, a young boy called Max, armed with a very large hammer. He is wearing a wolf suit and generally making mischief, such as chasing his dog about with a fork. His mother, who appears in the story only as a disembodied voice, shouts at Max that he is a “WILD THING!” to which Max responds by shouting back, “I’LL EAT YOU UP!”
Because of this, he is sent to bed without dinner. There, in his bedroom, his rage continues to burn, and soon trees begin to grow from the floor and his room becomes a forest. Max enters the forest before coming upon a boat that he takes across the ocean to “where the wild things are.”
Right on cue, these appear from the jungle, with sharp, pointed teeth and menacing claws, but Max confronts them and soon so thoroughly dominates that he becomes their king!
It all becomes a rather wild, frenzied romp, but after a while, Max begins to feel lonely and wish that he were “where someone loved him best of all.” He journeys home, leaving the wild things behind, and arrives back “into the night of his very own room, where he found his supper waiting for him.” And what’s more, the book finishes, it was still hot.
In a 2009 article reflecting on the eve of Wild Things’ cinematic interpretation, the contemporary American psychologist Richard Gottlieb analyzed Maurice Sendak’s book for The Psychologist. Gottlieb has no doubt that its central message of the book is that destructive rage allows children to survive disappointments and loss. Where the Wild Things Are vividly captures this dark truth.
Gottlieb also recalls the writer Francis Spufford’s description of Where the Wild Things Are as “one of the very few picture books to make an entirely deliberate, and beautiful, use of the psychoanalytic story of anger.” According to Spufford, Sendak’s writing is a study of intense emotions—including disappointment, fury, and even cannibalistic rage—and their transformation through creative activity. Could similar ingredients be said to exist in an inner-city community like Chicago—or, more generally, in the voting public—that all politicians must attempt to transform into positive energy?
In a pair of interviews with Leonard Marcus spaced five years apart (in 1988 and 1993), Sendak explains that the book begins with a child in a fit of bad temper triggered in part by destructive fantasies. This rage then results in an altered state of consciousness similar to that which occurs in a dream or even in an act of artistic creation. This altered state in turn then allows the child to confront the initial rage and achieve mastery over it.
Having conquered his anger, Max is drawn by the smell of food—representing maternal warmth and security—and returns home to find his mother’s love evidenced by the dinner she left in his room.
For Spufford, Sendak’s tale addresses our deepest, frequently repressed, concerns about ourselves. He says it meets children in a place of “anguished inner struggle” made up of such previously unspoken things as being consumed by sudden anger with their mother and fighting to control their own feelings.
What’s the author’s own personal story? It seems that Sendak’s own childhood was a miserable one. Born in Brooklyn in 1928, he was the youngest of three children. His parents, Phillip and Sadie, had emigrated from Poland before World War I. The families they left behind, although never known firsthand by young Maurice, had a great influence on the emotional tone of his childhood. “My father’s entire family was destroyed in the Holocaust. I grew up in a house that was in a constant state of mourning,” he said in an interview with Leonard Marcus in 2002. He has described his mother as disturbed and depressed and has alluded frequently to her lack of emotional availability, her preoccupation, and her chronic sadness. Death was a constant presence, if not as a fact then as a fantasy, worry, or deep concern. Maurice himself was a sickly child, suffering from scarlet fever, and his parents worried constantly about his health.
On top of all this, the year Maurice was born, his father lost every cent he had in a financial disaster. The morning of Maurice’s bar mitzvah, his father received news that his family had been wiped out by the Nazis. As for his remaining relatives, Sendak says they gave him the creeps. He has revealed that his models for drawing the Wild Things characters were his Jewish relatives who used to visit his family weekly when he was a child. They terrified him, and he dreaded their visits, because it always seemed to him that they might eat everything the family had. They also threatened him directly, he recalled, when they would pinch his cheek and tell him they would eat him up.
From around 1952 (when he was twenty-four years old), Sendak created what he called variously “fantasy sketches,” “stream-of-consciousness doodles,” and “dream pictures” while listening to classical music. His aim was not unlike that of a patient in psychoanalytic treatment, consisting of “letting whatever came into my mind come out on the paper, and my only conscious intention was to complete a whole ‘story’ on one page . . . beginning and ending, if possible, with the music itself.” He said that some of these were “purely fantastic meanderings that seem to roam carelessly through the unconscious.” Cannibalistic fantasies feature prominently, with themes of devouring and regurgitation. This last is quite a theme in psychiatry, the most common “eating disorder” in infancy.
What children need to survive, Sendak seems to suggest, are disappointments, losses, and, most important, destructive rages! In Sendak’s book, survival results from going to where the wild things are, albeit in the altered states of dream and daydream. Once there, as Richard Gottlieb has put it, the child can conquer them, and then they can return. Obama, it seems, adopted a very similar approach when he channeled not just the hopes and aspirations but also the rage and disappointment of voters by offering them not merely a political program but the right to dream. Obama is often considered a very cool, unemotional leader, almost a “technocrat” —but behind that surface is a much more complex and psychologically aware figure, one who evidently still enjoys the coded messages and Freudian interpretations of this deceptively simple children’s book.
Nonetheless, with Wild Things, it’s as well to realize that we’re really talking about psychology and metaphors, because otherwise this kind of story hardly augers well for the furry creatures and wild beasts of the real world. Unfortunately that distinction may be difficult to explain to very young children. So it’s perhaps fortunate for animals everywhere that Jane Goodall’s favorite children’s book offers a very different message.
Today, Jane Goodall is the inspirational anthropologist whose work living with and closely observing chimpanzees and other primates in Africa revolutionized our understanding both of these rare and endangered animals and of ourselves. However, Goodall admits that the germ of her future research lay in three children’s books: two about animals—Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Jungle Book—and a series of short stores by Edgar Rice Burroughs about a community of apes who raise a young boy called Tarzan. We usually think of Tarzan via the whimsical portrayals in television and films, but the apes in the Tarzan novels are made of more serious stuff. They have both a rudimentary society and a rudimentary morality. They negotiate and have discussions as a group involving concepts as abstract as ethical rights.
Indeed, Burroughs says that apes live in societies with unwritten laws. A more scientific account of animal life called The Miracle of Life (that Goodall’s grandmother got for her free by saving up coupons from cereal packets) contains considerable discussion of biology and behavior. Goodall told the website Radicalreads that she spent hours poring over the small print of those magical pages. “It was not a book written for children, but I was absolutely absorbed as I learned about the diversity of life on earth, the age of the dinosaurs, evolution and Charles Darwin, the early explorers and naturalists—and the amazing variety and adaptations of the animals around the world.”
Nonetheless, it is the fictional accounts that seem to have really lit Goodall’s original fire. In a 2016 World Books Day interview published by the Jane Goodall Institute, she recalls that
the first book that really made an impression was The Story of Dr. Dolittle by Hugh Lofting. An English country doctor who lived in Puddleby-on-the-Marsh who was taught how to speak to animals by his parrot, Polynesia . . . Mum got it for me from the library—we could not afford new books. I read it at least twice before it had to go back. In fact I loved it so much that Danny (my grandmother, with whom Mum, my sister Judy and I went to live after war broke out and my father joined up in the army) gave it to me as a great treat for Christmas, 1944. It was one of the most exciting presents I remember—my very own book!
In an earlier interview, in 2010, after Kathryn Reed asked the “iconic friend of the chimpanzees” to talk both about her past practical work in the field and what she thought were the greatest similarities she had observed between humans and the anthropoid monkeys, Goodall replied, “The non-verbal communication, kissing, embracing, holding hands, patting on the back, swaggering, throwing rocks, using tools, making tools, nurturing infants; showing real altruism by rescuing infants, adopting them, caring for them. And then on the reverse side you get this brutal behavior and a kind of primitive inclination to war as well.”
In chapter 2 of The Story of Doctor Dolittle, there is this message too, delivered by the parrot to the good doctor: “But animals don’t always speak with their mouths. They talk with their ears, with their feet, with their tails, with everything. Sometimes they don’t want to make a noise.” And the parrot points at the dog, called Jip, wrinkling his nose. “What’s that mean?” asks the doctor. “That means ‘Can’t you see that it has stopped raining?,’” Polynesia answered. “He is asking you a question. Dogs nearly always use their noses to ask questions.”
THE STORY OF DR. DOLITTLE
AUTHOR: HUGH LOFTING
PUBLISHED: 1920
The plot is admirably simple. Doctor John Dolittle loves animals. He has rabbits in his pantry, white mice in his piano, and a hedgehog living in his cellar. He has a horse, a cow, and several birds, including Dab-dab the duck, Polynesia the parrot, and Too-too the owl. In fact, we’re told, his office overflows with animal friends, and when he walks down the street the dogs run out to follow him and the crows start caw-cawing their approval. Of course, many people teach their parrots to speak a little English, but the big breakthrough for Dolittle comes one day when Polynesia the parrot teaches him the language of the animals. After this, Doctor Dolittle travels the world, as far away as Africa, to help his new friends.
The book was an instant hit. But when it was written, its author’s concerns were less with animals as such and more with encouraging children to respect the different peoples of the world, using animals as a kind of metaphor. In his afterword for the book, Lofting straightforwardly says, “If we make children see that all races, given equal mental and physical chances for development have about the same batting averages of good and bad, we shall have laid another very substantial foundation stone in the edifice of peace and internationalism.”
If that seems a strange thing, bear in mind that Dr. Dolittle made his very first appearance not in the book but in letters that Lofting wrote to his children while serving as a soldier in World War I.
Valerie Jane Morris-Goodall’s first contact with apes came as a very young child when her father, a London businessman called Mortimer Morris-Goodall, gave her a stuffed chimpanzee named Jubilee. Jane’s mother was worried that the chimpanzee might give Jane nightmares, but Jane loved it. (I hasten to explain we are talking about fluffy toys stuffed with foam rubber, nothing worse!) At the time of writing, Jubilee still sits on Goodall’s dresser in London.
Amazingly, for someone who later became an iconic figure in the study of primate behavior, Goodall had no formal training in zoology or biology. In fact, she had no university degree at all when she followed her passion for animals to the farm of a friend in the Kenya highlands in 1957. At first, the only role she had was that of a secretary, until one day, acting on a friend’s advice, she telephoned the famous Kenyan archaeologist and paleontologist Louis Leakey with no other thought than to make an appointment to discuss animals. It just so happened that Leakey, believing that the study of existing great apes could provide indications of the behavior of early hominids, invited Goodall to Olduvai Gorge in Tanganyika (present-day Tanzania), where he laid out his plans.
To start, Leakey sent Goodall to London to study primate behavior and to learn about their anatomy. As part of her research, she also returned to Gombe Stream National Park in Tanganyika, this time accompanied by her mother, whose presence was necessary to satisfy the safety requirements of their chief warden, David Anstey. With Leakey’s assistance and funding, Goodall (who, remember, had no degree) arrived at Newnham College, Cambridge, and obtained a PhD in ethology, the scientific study of animal behavior. She was only the eighth person to be allowed to study for a PhD there without first having obtained an undergraduate degree!
Her thesis drew on her first five years of study at the Gombe Reserve and detailed the behavior of free-living chimpanzees. Goodall observed things that researchers more conventionally trained, or perhaps just with more conventional mindsets, had overlooked. For a start, instead of numbering the chimpanzees she observed, she gave them names such as Fifi and David Greybeard and noted their unique and individual personalities, an unconventional idea at the time. (Numbering was a nearly universal practice and thought to be important so that researchers would not become attached to the subjects they were studying. But, of course, this naming of animals is a major part of the appeal and charm of Doctor Dolittle.)
As Goodall puts it in a 1996 PBS documentary called Jane Goodall’s Wild Chimpanzees, she found that “it isn’t only human beings who have personality, who are capable of rational thought [and] emotions like joy and sorrow.” She also observed behaviors such as hugs, kisses, pats on the back, and even tickling, all the kinds of actions that we normally consider unique to human interaction. She built up a theory that such gestures were evidence of “the close, supportive, affectionate bonds that develop between family members and other individuals within a community” and that such things suggest that similarities between humans and chimpanzees go far beyond mere genetics and can be seen in emotion, intelligence, and family and social relationships.
THE SOCIAL LIFE OF CHIMPANZEES
Among those whom Goodall named during her years in Gombe were
●David Greybeard, a gray-chinned male and the first chimp to accept Goodall as a friend;
●Goliath, a friend of David Greybeard, originally the alpha male of the troop;
●Mike, who through his cunning and improvisation displaced Goliath as the alpha male;
●Humphrey, a big, strong, bullying male;
●Gigi, a large, sterile female who delighted in being the “aunt” of any young chimps or humans;
●Mr. McGregor, another belligerent older male;
●Flo, a motherly, high-ranking female, and her children, Figan, Faben, Freud, Fifi, and Flint; and
●Frodo, Fifi’s second-oldest child, an aggressive male who would frequently attack Jane and ultimately force her to leave the troop.
Goodall’s research is renowned in the scientific community for challenging two long-standing beliefs of the day: that only humans could construct and use tools and that chimpanzees were vegetarians. As to the first, Goodall recounts observing chimpanzees fishing for termites. In her book Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey, she describes watching one feeding at a termite mound by repeatedly placing stalks of grass into termite holes and removing them covered with clinging, tasty termites. She also describes how the chimps would take twigs from trees and strip off the leaves to make the twig more effective, a form of object modification that is the rudimentary beginnings of tool making. Humans had long distinguished ourselves from the rest of the animal kingdom as “man the toolmaker.” In response to Goodall’s revolutionary findings, Louis Leakey wrote, “We must now redefine man, redefine tool, or accept chimpanzees as human.”
It is a perspective Dr. Dolittle shares as well, as when he announces,
I do not understand the human race
Has so little love for creatures with a different face.
Treating animals like people is no madness or disgrace.
I do not understand the human race.
However, in some ways, life at Gombe Stream was very different from the imaginary paradise of animal cooperation conjured up in Doctor Dolittle. Goodall found and reported a hitherto unrecorded aggressive side to chimpanzee behavior. For one thing, she found that the chimps systematically hunted and ate their smaller, weaker near relatives—such as colobus monkeys. Goodall records watching one hunting group isolate a colobus monkey high in a tree, block all possible exits, and then capture and kill it.
The chimpanzees then each took parts of the carcass, sharing with other members of the troop in response to begging behaviors. Incredibly, given that this aspect of chimp behavior had not been noted before, it turned out the chimps at Gombe killed and ate as much as one-third of the colobus population in the park each year. In such ways, Goodall’s work challenged and revolutionized the study of chimpanzees and the other primates.
In Reason for Hope, Goodall says of her discovery, “During the first ten years of the study I had believed . . . that the Gombe chimpanzees were, for the most part, rather nicer than human beings. . . . Then suddenly we found that chimpanzees could be brutal—that they, like us, had a darker side to their nature.”
Nonetheless, she managed to develop a close bond with the chimpanzees and to become the only human, to this day, ever accepted into chimpanzee society, as the lowest-ranking member of a troop for twenty-two months!
Throughout her life, Goodall has worked (and at the time of writing continues to work) tirelessly—and fearlessly—on behalf of Africa’s wild chimpanzees, even in her eighties contributing to a shift in the scientific understanding of how similar these animals really are to ourselves, both in their complex social behaviors and in their abilities to understand and communicate. Just as important as changing the expert view has been her influence on popular opinion. A prolific writer (like Obama), perhaps her best-known book is In the Shadow of Man, published in 1971 and since translated into forty-eight languages. We even had a copy in my home—but it was read less often than Doctor Dolittle!