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"A masterful and fully authorized biography of ... George Schaller, the greatest living field biologist, bringing to spectacular life the fifty years he spent immersed in the social worlds of wild animals around the globe In 1959, at just twenty-six years old, the biologist George Schaller shrugged off warnings of danger and recklessness and set off for the Congo to do what his contemporaries wouldn't dare: lead the first sustained field study of mountain gorillas by stepping foot into their world and living alongside them. Boldly refusing arms and retinue, Schaller, joined by his wife Kay, established a home in the jungle and assimilated to the gorillas' rhythms and rules. After two years of immersive field studies - a methodology he would hone for the next five decades of his life - Schaller drastically altered how the world viewed gorillas, not as brutes, but as compassionate and intelligent creatures, far more similar to humans than once believed. To Schaller, nature held a path not to cold mastery but to communion, and his quest to know these others would propel him across four continents and establish a technique which would go on to inspire generations of scientists. Schaller's desire to venture into the wilderness for days on end was the byproduct of not only a curious spirit, but a childhood steeped in displacement and isolation. Born in Berlin in 1933 to a German diplomat working for Hitler, the young Schaller survived aerial bombings and forced dislocation as the Allies closed in. Though his American mother brought him to St. Louis, Missouri in 1947, he was still the alien enemy. It was the woods that offered teenage George a place of respite, but it wasn't until he attended University of Alaska that he found a home in the zoology department, and a lifelong partner in Kay. Drawing on the biologist's unpublished journals, personal interviews, letters, slides, and fossils, environmental writer Miriam Horn gives full due to the extraordinary life of George Schaller, a towering founding father of wildlife conservation. Horn captures Schaller's adventures around the globe, as he conducts the first ever studies of Indian tigers, Serengeti lions, Brazilian jaguars and Chinese pandas, meticulously cataloging not just their behaviors, but also their interior lives. It was Schaller who spent months guiding Jane Goodall on her chimp study in Tanzania, and traversed Nepal with Peter Matthiessen in search of the elusive snow leopard. Again and again, he navigated acute danger, historic upheavals, and political unrest for the sakes of the animals he studied; he sought neither wealth nor fame, but empathy, for creatures big and small. For the first time, Horn illuminates Schaller's legendary work like never before, offering a verité window into how wholly he inhabited the role of a naturalist, one whose influence radiated far beyond science. Most fundamentally, he remade our understanding of animal consciousness, and urged communities and leaders to protect the delicate relationship between humans and animals. A lyrical examination of the man who challenged us to rethink our own place in the natural world, here is the definitive biography of George Schaller, biographer of animals"-- Provided by publisher. Read More |
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