Visions of Caliban: On Chimpanzees and People - Softcover

Peterson, Dale; Goodall, Jane

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0820322067 ISBN 13: 9780820322063

Publisher: University of Georgia Press, 2000

Synopsis

Using Shakespeare's play The Tempest and its characters Prospero and Caliban as structural metaphors representing the master-slave relationship between humans and chimpanzees, authors Dale Peterson and Jane Goodall collaborate in this exploration of our interaction with the species that shares more than 98 percent of our genetic makeup. After introducing us to an animal that fashions and uses tools, exploits forest medicines, transmits learned cultural behaviors, and exhibits human-like emotions, Peterson and Goodall present an illuminating, frequently startling study of the current threats to wild chimpanzees' habitats and the many abuses that chimps have endured and continue to face at the hands of humans. They address conservation issues and ethical questions concerning keeping chimpanzees in captivity, whether as pets or for entertainment or research, and offer firsthand evidence of the drastically declining numbers of chimpanzees in the wild.

Through their in-depth exploration of our relationship with chimpanzees, Peterson and Goodall demonstrate our close ties to these animals and also reveal how distant humans have become from their own place in nature. Both an informative, entertaining collection of stories about the authors' research experiences with chimps and a poignant call for a change in our perceptions and treatment of them, Visions of Caliban is a moving and important work.

About this title

Review:

For the last 35 years British biologist Jane Goodall has been living among African chimpanzees, recording their behavior and explaining it in a number of fine books. With literature professor Dale Peterson, Goodall here looks at the place of chimpanzees in the popular imagination, from Shakespeare's play The Tempest (whence the book's title) to David Letterman's monkey-cam, while Goodall recaps her work among chimps and decries their probably unhappy future. As she tells us in chilling detail, the chimpanzees' rain forest habitat is on the decline due to consumption of fuel wood as well as industrial logging, and chimps are thus threatened with extinction. The authors even wonder whether, given the relentless destruction of the chimpanzees' home, the poor creatures might not be better off in zoos. Peterson's and Goodall's point-counterpoint makes for fascinating, if somber, reading.

About the Author:

Dale Peterson (Author)
DALE PETERSON is also the author of The Deluge and the Ark: A Journey into Primate Worlds, Chimpanzee Travels: On and Off the Road in Africa, and Storyville, USA (Georgia). He is co-author, with Richard Wrangham, of Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence. He teaches at Tufts University.

Jane Goodall (Author)
JANE GOODALL is recognized worldwide for her research and field work with chimpanzees. She has written more than twenty books, including In the Shadow of Man, The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior, Through a Window: My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of Gombe, and, most recently, the best-selling Reason for Hope.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0820322067
• ISBN 13: 9780820322063
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 379