Through a Window, a non-fictional novel by Jane Goodall is the dramatic saga of 30 years in Gombe, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, where the principle residents are chimpanzees and one extraordinary woman. The book is a chronicle of war, murder, mother love, brutal deaths, and the joy of living. Jane Goodall is an internationally renowned primatologist and conservationist who has spent more than twenty-five years living in the jungles of Tanzania studying chimpanzees. Goodall first arrived in Kenya in 1957 and sought out the famous anthropologist Louis Leakey in hopes of getting a job studying animals. Leakey, seeing Goodall's lack of a college education as an advantage, since it meant that her mind was uncluttered by academia, allowed her to assist him with his work and eventually encouraged her to devote all her energies to studying chimpanzees in the Gombe, a rugged, mountainous region in Tanzania. Although many people at the time doubted that a woman living on her own in the wild could survive, let alone complete a scientifically significant project, Goodall revolutionized the study of primates through her unorthodox approach to observation in the wild and successfully established the longest running field study of animals in their natural habitat. In her years in the wild, Goodall came to see that chimpanzees are highly intelligent, emotional creatures that live in complex social groups. She also discovered that chimpanzees make and use tools, a skill long assumed to be only possessed by humans. This research has compelled the scientific community to reassess how primates should be studied. Goodall insists that everyone recognize that it isn't only human beings who have personality, who are capable of rational thought and emotions like joy and sorrow. The behavior of chimpanzees when it comes to mother-infant relationships and dominance patterns is remarkably similar to those of human behaviors.
