Through a Window

My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of Gombe

By: Jane Goodall

Narrated by: Pearl Hewitt

Length: 11 hrs and 47 mins

Publisher's summary

In her classic, In the Shadow of Man, Jane Goodall wrote of her first 10 years at Gombe. In Through a Window she continues the story, painting a more complete and vivid portrait of our closest relatives.

On the shores of Lake Tanganyika, Gombe is a community where the principal residents are chimpanzees. Through Goodall's eyes we watch young Figan's relentless rise to power and old Mike's crushing defeat. We learn how one mother rears her children to succeed, and another dooms hers to failure. We witness horrifying murders, touching moments of affection, joyous births, and wrenching deaths.

As Goodall compellingly tells the story of this intimately intertwined community, we are shown human emotions stripped to their essence. In the mirror of chimpanzee life, we see ourselves reflected.

©1990 Soko Publications Limited; Preface copyright 2010 by Jane Goodall; Afterword copyright 2010 by Jane Goodall (P)2018 Tantor

The wonderful Dr. Jane Goodall

The best parts of this book are the descriptions of the extraordinary relationships among the chimpanzees. Jane Goodall has a remarkable ability for interpreting her observations of chimpanzee social behaviours ad stories and it makes her writing addictive. Hers is a profoundly empathetic voice. She gently encourages her audience to ponder our near kinship to chimpanzees and to question what it means to be human. Her prose is clear and rich in precisely ordered detail, and full of emotional depth. Having said this, the parts of the book that were not as interesting, to me at least, are the tangents into the more human oriented activities like what the groups of research students were up to or the training undertaken for various people. Human beings are rather boring in this context with the exception of Jane and her second husband who was like a kind of modern Lawrence of Arabia.

Great, simply great

I am so glad this is on Audible ..it is certainly one of the best animal behavior books I have ever read. Plus it is so thought provoking and honest and interesting. the performance was the best. Needless to say I loved it

beryllium rioting, content and narration

A fascinating and thorough study of the behavior of chimps through their lifetimes. Jane Goodall has done a magnificent job. It's worth learning about chimp behavior if only to underline some of what we notice in our own behaviors.

really interesting and entertaining

I loved this book and found it both really interesting and entertaining. Hearing about the chimps that Jane Goodell had spent so many years of her life with was wonderful. definitely worth a listen

I really loved it and felt as if I was there.

The way it was told I just felt like I was there in the jungle with Jane learning about chimps. great story.

Ghastly. Heartbreaking.

Do not read this in anticipation of pastoral vignettes of our closest relatives' natural instincts and behavior. The chimps' behaviors are alarming, cruel by our "civilized" standards and seemingly a series of responses to danger, disappointment and terror-inducing assaults on their sensibilities by friend and foe. Then humans come along and kidnap, kill, imprison, inject, infect and relentlessly destroy all that makes the chimpanzees noble in rheir cultural mania. How did Dr Goodall survive 50 years of such sad reality? I am devastated to think of the babies - dragged by a leg, neglected, dropped, stolen, murdered, or - oh yes, we're part of it - violently orphaned by hunters, shoved in a basket and shipped to a 5x5 cage, sensorily deprived, maimed, made mad, made sick, made hollow - often for DECADES! Dr Goodall tells us about it as clearly as she can, and change comes...with maddening...

Wonderfully Insightful

This amazing autobiography offers a glimpse into Dr. Goodall’s world and groundbreaking work that revolutionized science forever.
-David Couto-