Through a Window: My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of Gombe

The chimpanzee is more like us than any living creature . . . in the structure of the DNA, chimpanzees differ by only just over one per cent.

Perhaps you’ve watched chimps at the zoo, a nice zoo with a roomy natural habitat, and wondered if they behave the same way in the wild. Allow legendary primatologist Jane Goodall to introduce you to Flo the matriarch, Figan the alpha, Frodo and Freud the clowns, Fifi the sexpot, and Faben the underdog. As with any human family, they all have their unique status in the jungle they share with quirky neighbors. What of the pampered pets? Meet Lucy, who mixes her own hi-balls to enjoy with TV and magazines, and drug-addicted Charlie. And those poor lab subjects in cramped cages? Some, like JoJo are puzzled, bored, and depressed. Others simply lose their minds.

Here is everything you ever wanted to know or wouldn’t have thought to ask about chimpanzees: their strengths and vulnerabilities, families and friendships, mating and feeding rituals, warfare, play, and endangered status in nature and captivity. This memoir of Goodall’s long acquaintance with the chimps  brings to life her surprised delight and repulsion at events as touching as adoption and as gruesome as cannibalism. Written with such visual clarity and expressive turn of phrase that it merits literary as well as scientific praise, this is an accessible work of resounding importance.

For an up-close look at the chimps and Goodall, watch this 60 Minutes interview and retrospective.

Robinson Crusoe

How wonderfully we are deliver’d, when we know nothing of it.

Continuing in the vein of solitude from the last two reviews, Daniel Dafoe’s 1719 classic, widely considered the first English novel, has been adapted for film 132 times, starring the likes of Douglas Fairbanks and Pierce Brosnan. Who can resist a castaway story that doesn’t end in death or madness, let alone one in which the hero, even after twenty-three years, could have been content to have capitulated for spending the rest of [his] life there?

If travelers stranded in the wild make for good viewing, Crusoe’s life is less Bear Grylls than Old MacDonald, for he was fortunate enough to land on fertile ground with no predators: just easily domesticated goats and parrots. On top of that there was a bounty of shipwrecked booty: seeds for planting as well as bread to tide him over, tools, guns, pets, and even rum! All he wanted was company, so he saved the intended victim of visiting cannibals and got his servant Friday in the bargain. The story, unlikely as it seems, is actually the embellished tale of Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk, who was marooned for four years not in the Caribbean, as Dafoe depicts, but on an Argentine island featured in this BBC special .

It had been thirty years since I last read this tale, and I was delighted to rediscover Crusoe’s industrious ingenuity. Deprived of the story’s surprises though, the cumbersome language felt more stilted than I remembered. Furthermore, I had forgotten the evangelical point of the entire plot: that God provides. For a taste of such theological musings, check out this debate between Crusoe (Brosnan) and  Friday (William Takaku) .  That which is powerful in the film, alas, seems too Joel Osteen on the page. I wanted a survival manual, not a testimony of Christian witness. But those were the times—speaking of which, Crusoe’s entitled colonial attitude is grating to modern sensibilities. More baffling was his abandonment of other European castaways with whom he ultimately planned to return to civilization. Another ship came along and, oh well, he left without them. I’m still grappling with that unchristian move. Still, Dafoe didn’t do badly for a first novel, especially a first by anyone!

If, after all this gravity, you’re in the mood for a little frivolity, play Al Jolson’s hit song Where Did Robinson Crusoe Go with Friday on Saturday Night?

Walden

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

When Henry David Thoreau moved to Walden Pond in 1845, a mile-and-a-half from the city of Concord in a tidy cabin crafted from salvaged materials, he was Harvard-educated and privileged enough to afford a two-year staycation. By farming, fishing, and living minimalistically, he was at leisure to revel in nature and ponder—penning wisdom for any who might care to be enlightened, which was not many people at first. His wisdom reads, at times, like Franklin’s aphorisms from Poor Richard’s Almanac a hundred years earlier, albeit with greater elucidation. To wit:

It is never too late to give up our prejudices.

Goodness is the only investment that never fails.

Time is but the stream I go fishing in.

I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be crowded on a velvet cushion.

I never found the companion that was as companionable as solitude.

Or did he? Solitude means different things to different people. In my last review, The Stranger in the Woods, we met a hermit living in frozen isolation for twenty-seven years, terrified lest he encounter other humans. Thoreau, on the other hand, seemed always to be entertaining neighbors or trekking to town. No wonder he was never cast away nor distressed in any weather. He was living the American dream: a lake house convenient to civilization. If I sound dubious, it may be that I am. If I sound jealous, I definitely am. I want a tiny house flooded with sunlight, kaleidoscopic autumns, dark and hooty nights, a window on life beneath the transparent ice, wild critters tamed to my presence, and joyous springs jumping from hummock to hummock. Who wouldn’t? No wonder this book became a classic.

Things do not change; Thoreau said. We change. That’s what these transcendental musings can do for the modern reader, help us feel the change that peace brings. Read it once for content and again for feeling. Take notes. But first, watch Bob Vila’s tour of the historic site where Thoreau lived, complete with an educational “author interview” at his recreated cabin.

The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Life of the Last True Hermit

The past, the land of wistfulness, and the future, the place of yearning, seemed to evaporate. Knight simply existed, for the most part, in the perpetual now.

On a scenic Kennebec county, Maine lake no less! Sounds enviable, until you think of doing it for twenty-seven years—in a makeshift shelter, without fire, through long dark winters with average snowfalls of 72” and temps dipping to -25o F. That’s what happens when you drop off the radar without no plan and no wish to ever be found. Your provisions run out, and then what? You steal, of course, from the surrounding cabins. That’s 1,000 heart-thumping, shame-faced burglaries.

Christopher Knight had a decent job and loving family when he slipped out of sight at age twenty-one, but this outlaw life of self-imposed hardship was the only escape he could envision from the uncomfortable world of modern society. Noise harms your body and boils your brain, writes Michael Finkel in his 2017 best-seller (Knopf 191 pg. or 6 hours 20 minutes on Audible). The word “noise” is derived from the Latin word for “nausea”. It was no spiritual quest or a philosophical statement on Christopher Knight’s part that drove him into the woods, but simple alienation. Some people aren’t hard-wired for socialization.

This nonfiction offers a detailed examination of desperate genius and a sympathetic portrait of a tortured soul. For a succinct and entertaining summary of the North Pond Hermit’s story, complete with biographical ballad, watch this 5 ½ minute New York Times human-interest story .

Jesus’ Son

Thursday nights I usually went to an AA meeting in an Episcopal church’s basement. We sat around collapsible tables looking very much like people stuck in a swamp—slapping at invisible things, shifting, squirming, scratching, rubbing the flesh of our arms and our necks.

When Denis Johnson received the Library of Congress Prize for American fiction two months before his death in 2017, he was lauded as a writer for our times whose prose fused grace with grit. (Watch the dedication here.) Johnson himself described his works as pressure cookers of language, a great image for its evocation of boiled dinners commingling whatever’s in the fridge. His linked short stories about drug-addled drifters and disabused dreamers paint the duality of humanity from perspectives rarely voiced with sympathy. Here the need for self-preservation sabotages the wish for love; a care-giver can be a hero by day and a peeping Tom by night; and where a girl with virginal sadness can also be a torn-up trollop.

To sample Johnson’s blend of surreal disquietude and unexpected humor, watch this clip, “A Stabbing Headache”, from the 1999 film starring Billy Crudup and Jack Black , a film that appears, from the online excerpts, to veer closer to the Nineties stoner-vibe than to the timeless desperation of the book whose characters walk a fine line between damnation and hope.

Combining the candid punch of Colum McCann with the descriptive power of Wallace Stegner, this tiny gem of a novel (at 133 pocket-sized pages in the Picador Modern Classics edition) promises a trip as unforgettable as his “Biggest pill I’ve ever seen”.  Also available on Audible.com paired with Train Dreams (5 ½ hours), and perfectly narrated by Will Patton.

Once More We Saw Stars

What do you call parents who lose children? . . . there is no word in our language for our situation. It is unspeakable, and by extension, we are not supposed to exist.

A memoir of mourning may not sound uplifting, especially when the subject is the two-year-old victim of a freak accident, but Jayson Greene’s testament to love and hope, as he calls it, is just that. In their uncensored and atheistic (though far from a-spiritual) grapple with grief, Greene and wife Stacy pass through the five stages to emerge intact and able to welcome a new child into their lives. To do otherwise, he says, would be like arguing with the snow.

Nuanced writing and vivid recollections of their daughter Greta combine with a dawning appreciation for her unseen spirit, which accompanies them into the next chapter of their lives. A 2019 best-seller, at 243 pages or seven hours beautifully narrated by the author, this is a story anyone with a pulse will cherish, a sort of Death Be Not Proud for the modern age with a classic title from Dante’s Inferno. For as Greene observes in his darkest times, it is in experiencing the world’s most universal emotions that we feel most alone.  

For a summary of the book and further thoughts on dealing with Grieving with Love and Hope, watch this interview with Kristina Kuzmic.

Look Homeward Angel

You will die a hundred times before you become a man.

Thomas Wolfe’s 1929 classic chronicles a boy’s life of privation from infancy to independence in a manner so exacting that the reader practically relives each day as he felt it, when Time droned like a sleepy October fly. In a boarding house suffocating with meanness of purse and heart, Eugene Gant’s alcoholic father and image-conscious mother raise children blighted with anxiety, resentment, and criminality. Yet still, precocious Eugene indulges in childishly melodramatic daydreams en route to the usual rites of passage, culminating in adolescent heartbreak, the pointless death of a consumptive brother, and a clean break from home. Intensely autobiographical, this paragon of character study draws so keenly on Wolfe’s youth in Asheville, North Carolina that hometown acquaintances spurned him upon recognizing themselves in the sensational work—a situation posthumously revisited in You Can’t Go Home Again.

In scope and exactitude, this novel resembles Somerset Maugham’s masterpiece Of Human Bondage (reviewed here November 18th), but whereas Maugham’s dialogue-driven plot feels inspired by the stage, Wolfe’s work seems to draw on the arcades of his childhood. Drop a penny in the Mutoscope, turn the hand-crank, and peep through the spyhole as ordinary events scroll by in a flip-book simulation of life. How ironic, then, that his tale is more famous for its Pulitzer prize winning play-adaptation, excerpted here .

This is a heavy tome, not in style but in length and substance, for . . . the nightmare cruelty of life is not in the remote and fantastic, but in the probable—the horror of love, loss, marriage, the ninety seconds treason in the dark. Therefore, it is more readily accessible in audio, at over 26 hours, than on paper, at 638 pages. If you only have one such Herculean effort in you and want to experience the legend that is Thomas Wolfe, I suggest skipping ahead to You Can’t Go Home Again.

Waterborne: A Slow Trip Around a Small Planet

I have always thought of my life as a trade-off . . .. But actually, it is more a process of letting go of my past life and concerns and loves. Thinning down for the journey which only looks like a trip around the world when in reality it is a trip out of it.

Retirement can truly be anything you want—if you’re willing to sacrifice. Just ask Marguerite Welch who, at age fifty-two, embarked with her husband Michael, a career naval officer, on a fourteen-year circumnavigation of the globe: an extraordinary feat even by the standards of their hometown, “Sailing Capital of the World,” Annapolis, Maryland. Together they logged 43,822 nautical miles, visited 60 countries, and spent up to 27 days at a stretch exclusively in each other’s company aboard a sailboat smaller than the typical school bus. And for the first two years, as far as Columbia, they had their Labrador retriever onboard!

At a stage of life when many women discover the spa, she traded battered limbs, broken nails, and salty-stiff hair for a life of discovery, roseate dawn-watches, and dolphins frolicking off the bow. While she might have been reading to her grandchildren, she was exploring at length all the places she’d read of her whole life: Bali, Rome, La Mancha, Morocco . . . Some ports disappointed, some exceeded the couple’s expectations, and others—like Vietnam—had changed beyond recognition in the decades since their youth. The take-away was an appreciation for the universal brotherhood of all cultures, and a heightened appreciation for home, God, and each other.

The Welches named their boat Ithaca after a poem by C.P. Cafavy, who advised, When you start on your journey to Ithaca, then pray that the road is long, full of adventure, full of knowledge. At a conversational 315 pages, this newly released memoir would make the perfect holiday gift for any adventurer. To get a feel for the author’s easy-going style, watch this interview. https://foxbaltimore.com/morning/waterbourne-a-slow-trip-around-a-small-planet

Memento Park

The mysteries of our parents will always remain out of reach.

Mark Sarvas’s second novel recently won an American Book Award and a Jewish Fiction Award for its achingly honest portrayal of an actor with the Americanized name of Matt Santos coming to grips with his lost heritage and emotionally distant father. The catalyst, an art history mystery of significant monetary value, takes him from Los Angeles to Budapest in search of the painting’s provenance and his family’s roots. Aiding him on this quest are two love interests, a shiksa fiancée and a Jewish lawyer who both appreciate that a person’s actions are not always indicative of their character.

The story is told from Matt’s viewpoint as he mentally unburdens all his frustration, anger, and confusion on a gallery security guard, a guy he mentally addresses as Virgil throughout the nine hours it takes him to narrate the story (on Audible)—conveniently the length of his work shift. Matt tells his tale with sardonic wit and a gradually dawning appreciation for the complexity of the people in his life, a realization that prompts him to question, what makes one life more worth examining than another? The monstrous father, more invested in his model cars than his son, is fleetingly unmasked as a softy just as the Matt begins to recognize him in himself and wonders what he might have been able to achieve if he hadn’t always been waiting for permission to act.

At 271 pages this is a fast-paced, immersive story that will resonate on some level with most readers for its provocative exploration of family legacies and their value. Before starting, though, acclimate your mind to the history and your ear to the accents by watching this four minute film, Hungarian Jewry, Last Victims of the Holocaust at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acIzQXf2d80 .

Of Human Bondage

The meaning (of life) is useless unless you discover it for yourself.

W. Somerset Maugham’s 1915 semi-autobiographical novel is no breezy read at 712 pages (or 28 hours on Audible), yet despite being written over a century ago, it ranks 66th on the Modern Library’s list of the best novels of all time. Perhaps most memorable as the miserably misguided love affair of a kind-hearted cripple, it is more importantly a journey of self-actualization. Orphaned at a young age and raised by a sternly parochial uncle, Philip Carey makes his way from accountant to artist to doctor, gentleman to pauper, and Anglican to atheist in a richly varied life he compares to the tapestry of a Persian rug. Along the way he befriends intellectuals and Bohemians from all strata of society while alternately pursing and dodging the most exasperating woman imaginable.

Addressing such universal themes as unrequited love, addiction, the treachery and charity of friends, and greedy deathbed vigils, this is a three-decade journey of philosophical introspection punctuated by foolish choices that leave the reader alternately crying, cheering, and moaning with dread. Each episode of Philip’s life brings observations as rich as toffees. On art: There is nothing so terrible as the pursuit . . . by those who have no talent. On life: The only way to live is to forget that you’re going to die.  On love: The important thing is to love rather than be loved.

The 1934 film version made Bette Davis a star, playing Philip’s (Leslie Howard’s) beloved Mildred in a relationship that is doomed from start https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aaqYIKUKaI to finish https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8g-w5cuWI5o and proves that though all things human are transitory, human nature itself hasn’t changed in a century.