Skip to main content

Hope for Animals and Their World – Jane Goodall ****

Jane Goodall is one of those figures in science (or, at least, natural history) who is near mythical. I have to confess to a tendency to confuse her with Diane Fossey (not to be confused with Bob Fosse), so I was slightly surprised that she was English and lives in Bournemouth. However what is certainly not mythical is her enthusiasm for animals which in this book (co-written with Thane Maynard and Gail Hudson) she manages to put across in spades.
The idea is that we hear so much doom and gloom about animals being driven to extinction by climate change and human intervention, and this is a chance to hear the good news – the stories of animals we have managed to bring back from the brink. This works very well. It is heartening to hear. Also fascinating to see the in-fighting between those conservationists who believe animals should always be left in their natural habit and those who believe captive breeding is often essential. Goodall comes down on the side of the captive breeders, and it really does look like the other camp is putting philosophy ahead of the survival of animals.
The writing style is very light and personal. Some of it is almost as if it’s written by a very well-read ten-year-old. I don’t mean that to sound condescending – Goodall is certainly child-like in her joy in living creatures, but not childish. It’s just that this isn’t polished science writing, it’s more like reading a personal journal. I used to love Gerald Durrell’s books as a child, and I was reminded of that same personal enthusiasm and involvement.
I only had two small problems with this book. One was the sheer length of it. It’s 380 pages without the index, and to be honest, while there are obviously big differences between stories of black robins and of condors, there are just so many ‘bird being saved’ stories you can read without them getting a bit samey. I think there’s a bit of ‘famous author syndrome’ here – the editor didn’t dare suggest cutting down. I think the book would have been better with about half the case stories and a bit more depth to the science.
The other problem is that there was a touch of hypocrisy in the way we are encouraged not to destroy the world, yet Jane Goodall clearly flies thousands of miles each year, visiting many countries. This really isn’t justifiable, given the impact of that travel on the environment. (There’s even a section on the back that seems to encourage people to travel the world to see these creatures. No! Don’t! Just read about them, please.)
Despite those concerns, this is a really interesting book. I would have liked to see something about how we should make the decisions on which species to concentrate on. We see a lot of time, effort and money being spent on specific species – there’s no way we could afford to do this for (say) every insect in danger. How do we make those decisions? Even so it is good to know that some species have been hauled back from the brink – and good to see Goodall’s enthusiasm, shining through every page.

Paperback:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you  
Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...

Pagans (SF) - James Alistair Henry *****

There's a fascinating sub-genre of science fiction known as alternate history. The idea is that at some point in the past, history diverged from reality, resulting in a different present. Perhaps the most acclaimed of these books is Kingsley Amis's The Alteration , set in a modern England where there had not been a reformation - but James Alistair Henry arguably does even better by giving us a present where Britain is a third world country, still divided between Celts in the west and Saxons in the East. Neither the Normans nor Christianity have any significant impact. In itself this is a clever idea, but what makes it absolutely excellent is mixing in a police procedural murder mystery, where the investigation is being undertaken by a Celtic DI, Drustan, who has to work in London alongside Aedith, a Saxon reeve of equivalent rank, who also happens to be daughter of the Earl of Mercia. While you could argue about a few historical aspects, it's effectively done and has a plot...

Amazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Science Fact: Keith Cooper ****

There's something appealing (for a reader like me) about a book that brings together science fiction and science fact. I had assumed that the 'Amazing Worlds' part of the title suggested a general overview of the interaction between the two, but Keith Cooper is being literal. This is an examination of exoplanets (planets that orbit a different star to the Sun) as pictured in science fiction and in our best current science, bearing in mind this is a field that is still in the early phases of development. It becomes obvious early on that Cooper, who is a science journalist in his day job, knows his stuff on the fiction side as well as the current science. Of course he brings in the well-known TV and movie tropes (we get a huge amount on Star Trek ), not to mention the likes of Dune, but his coverage of written science fiction goes into much wider picture. He also has consulted some well-known contemporary SF writers such as Alastair Reynolds and Paul McAuley, not just scient...