Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey (edition 2000)

NA

I really love optimists; I think they're some of the best people. When you combine optimism with realism, I think you get the very best. That's what Jane Goodall gives us with this book. ( )

I listened to the audio format of this book and had a pleasurable experience. I felt as if the balance between science, memoir, and reflection on spiritual matters had a fairly good balance. This wasn't a grand experience filled with relation and growth for me as a reader, but it was a good look into life, emotion, and feeling of someone I respect very much. Readers who know something of Goodall's life probably won't be surprised by the events mentioned here, but will likely enjoy the glimpse into her life events and the emotions those things brought to her life. ( )

I enjoyed this book. Of course, I had heard of Jane Goodall and her foundation but didn't realize that her passion is driven from a spiritual base. The story of her life is amazing to me, especially as I learned that she really just ventured out to Africa to fulfill a dream with no real training to do what she hoped to do.

I was challenged by the way she weaves together her spiritual understanding of creation with her scientific understanding of evolution ... not just physical, but also social and moral.

The purpose of her book can be summed up by a quote toward the end where she says … "every human, every unique being, plays some role in the shaping of progress, though only some get into history books. Throughout every second of every day there is change abroad in the world, change due to the impact of mind on mind; teacher and pupil, parent and child, world leader and citizen, writer or actor and the general public. Each one of us carries seeds for change. Seeds that need nurturing to realize their potential." (p. 203) ( )

The book is by the famous anthropologist Jane Goodall, whose studies of chimpanzees revolutionized how we think of our closest relative among living species and thus how we define being human. Her title signals this book is about a lot more than that groundbreaking work. This was found in the Nature section of my neighborhood bookstore, but was recommended to me as "inspirational non-fiction" on the Ultimate Reading List. Her credited co-author Philip Berman is a theologian and the project was first conceived as "a book of interviews--questions from a theologian to an anthropologist."

Reading this I could have wished for a lot more of the anthropological and less of the spiritual. This memoir of her experiences had its pleasures and moving moments. I loved the story about how Louis Leakey recruited Goodall, who at the time had never attended a university, to go off to study chimpanzees in the wild. And I certainly found moving her story about the death of her husband from cancer. I thought she was at her best though in chapters such as "The Roots of Evil," "Precursors to War" and "Compassion and Love" when she spoke directly out of her study and observations of chimpanzees. But there's a lot in her moral, political and spiritual outlook I find antithetical to mine that made it hard at times to hear her out. Frequently I found myself irritated, and found myself skimming large parts of chapters. I frankly squirmed reading about her psychic experiences. Her style is lucid enough, but having recently read Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa, Goodall's prose did strike me in comparison as prosaic--this isn't a memoir you read out of literary merit. And when it came to so many of her political and spiritual views, there was so little I felt I hadn't heard many times before--that didn't feel like boilerplate. It's because there was so much in the book I couldn't take seriously, things outside the scope of her expertise, that despite fascinating bits in the book I can't rate this higher.

Was there any point in her arguments on issues I disagreed with where she got through to me? Interestingly, yes. Primarily in the Chapter "On the Road to Damascus" regarding animal research. I think it's significant that this was an issue where I didn't feel she was just repeating what many others had said. Her experiences observing chimpanzees, and her discussion of the cruelty of how they're treated in laboratories--ones she actually visited--resonated. Precisely because she spoke with the authority of direct experience. She also deflected a lot of my defenses by admitting the good that animal research had done; her own mother is alive because of animal research and the pig valve implanted in her heart. Yes, Goodall would like to someday eliminate animal experimentation, but the thrust of her argument was for treating the animals in laboratories as humanely as possible, and looking for alternatives. She didn't give anything like the PETA line that "A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy." And she gained my respect because of how she related how she actually sat down with researchers and worked with them to better the conditions of research animals--she didn't just hurl rhetorical bricks from outside the walls. So besides the fascinating look here and there at the experiences of a pioneering women in the study of primates, I learned a little about what it is that can break down resistance to truly considering the other side of an argument. And despite my disagreements with Goodall, at the finish of her book she had my admiration, liking and respect. ( )