Beyond Innocence by Jane Goodall, edited by Dale Peterson, Houghton Mifflin,
$28, ISBN 0618125205
POSTAL workers everywhere must love Jane Goodall. Since setting off for
Africa as an ambitious 22-year-old, the now-famous chimp watcher has sent
thousands of letters. Luckily, the recipients by and large kept what she wrote.
Editor Dale Peterson turns almost 2 million of her words into a book.
It’s a clever way to produce an instant autobiography, and an appealing one
at that. After all, reading somebody else’s post has an intrinsic voyeuristic
appeal. But in Jane’s case, there’s more: this woman has clearly lived an…
