George Schaller invented the way modern field biology is done, which was mostly to go sit with the animals for years. Born in Berlin in 1933 to an American mother and a Nazi diplomat father, shuttled through occupied countries, he came to the US as an enemy alien at fourteen. Then: Two years living unarmed among mountain gorillas in the Congo, which turned them from monsters into a family; then Serengeti lions, Indian tigers, Himalayan snow leopards, Tibetan antelope, and parks established on four continents. He taught Jane Goodall how to watch chimps. Horn had his journals and letters and went into the field with him twice, and she doesn’t sand off the coldness that came with the discipline.
Homesick for a World Unknown