Why is Jane Goodall running up the mountain naked? Did she raise her son in Gombe? What did Galdikas sit on? What was up with Leakey and the card test? How did Fossey die? The last image we have of her alive is toting an oxygen tank which implies a very different death. Also, Leakey's sexual exploits are problematic. But Leakey was making sweeping generalizations based on gender, and these authors seemed to buy into his theories that women are better at field studies.
Perhaps the writers felt that they were being feminists by complimenting women. His opinion that women were better in the field than men, more observant and more patient, was repeated several times in the book.
But beware! The women were all brought into science thanks to Louis Leakey's sexism. I see the target reader of this book as young girls with a burgeoning interest in science. This is the first time I have had such a criticism of a First Second book, whose titles have always been meticulously crafted. These are all minor distractions that could have been easily cleaned up by a more careful editor. The art was generally appealing, except that some noses looked distractingly odd.
The shifting voices were particularly distracting when one scientist was writing about another. One page had voice bubbles that looked like they were typed in Comic Sans. But the other characters do not receive such clear treatment, changing fonts from serif to sans-serif as if that is a significant enough shift for the average reader. It started out well with Leakey's voice in brown and Goodall's voice in blue. The significance of their political work and the toll their research took on their personal lives was also included in this slim volume.Ĭonfusing shifts in narration. I learned about their significant findings that shook the scientific world: chimpanzees using tools and orangutans walking on the ground. I had never heard of Galdikas or her research with Orangutans. I had no idea that Louis Leakey helped secure the funding for Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall and got them their starts in field research. Yay! Women scientists! At times funny and fascinating.
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