Beyond Innocence: An Autobiography in Letters The Later Years

This second volume of Jane Goodall’s autobiography in letters covers the years of her greatest triumphs and her deepest tragedies. During this time she made many of her most important discoveries about chimpanzee behavior — including the dark discovery that like us, they wage war and commit murder. She gave birth to a son, Grub, but her marriage to his father, Hugo van Lawick, came to an end. When some Stanford University students working with her were kidnapped by guerrillas, she was thrust into an international controversy. She fell in love with and married Derek Bryceson. After surviving a plane crash with him, she realized that her life had been entrusted to her for a reason. A visit to an American laboratory where chimps were injected with HIV made that reason clear, and she began to dedicate herself not just to understanding chimpanzees but to saving them. Derek’s death in 1980 was a terrible blow, but afterward she threw herself even more relentlessly into the battle to save our closest relatives and to repair the health of the planet. AFRICA IN MY BLOOD told of a young woman finding her life’s work in the place of her dreams. BEYOND INNOCENCE tells of the events that shattered many of those dreams and changed her from a rather private observer to a public crusader.

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