Introduction

As a toddler she was entranced by all living things, and the child inspired by Tarzan and The Jungle Book became the woman who found herself working with Dr. Louis Leakey, making scientific breakthroughs with chimpanzees in Gombe, and becoming one of the world's foremost champions of the environment. Here is the story of a life blessed with faith, resolve, and purpose; of a woman who has been tested by hardship and, with the help of her religious convictions, has survived. At one with nature and challenged by environmental destruction, Dr. Goodall offers insight and provides us all a Reason for Hope.

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Excerpt

Beginnings

This is a story about a journey, the journey of one human being through sixty-five years of earth time: my journey. Traditionally, a story begins at the beginning. But what is the beginning? Is it the moment when I was born, with all the charming ugliness of the newborn human baby, in a hospital in London? The first breath I drew so that I could yell about the pain and indignity of my forced expulsion from the womb? Or should we start earlier, in the dark, moist secret place where one little wiggling sperm—one out of millions—managed to burrow into one little ovum—the fertile egg that was biologically, magically, transformed into a baby? But that, really, is not the beginning. For the genes that were handed down to me by my parents were created long, long ago. And my inherited traits were molded by the people and the events surrounding my early years: the characters and position of my parents, the country into which I was born, and the era in which I grew up. So should the story start with my parents, with the historical and social events that shaped Europe in the 1930s, that molded Hitler and Churchill and Stalin? Or perhaps we should go back to the first truly human creature that was born of ape-men parentage, or back to the first little warm-blooded mammal? Or should we go back and back through the mists of unknown time to when the first speck of life appeared on planet earth—as a result of some divine purpose or cosmic accident? From there we could start my story, tracing the strange paths that life has taken: from amoeba, through apes, to minds that can contemplate the existence of a God, and strive to understand the meaning of life on earth and beyond the stars. ... view entire excerpt...

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»	Publisher's Book Info
»	Jane Goodall's web site
»	Excerpt

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