Winter’s text is spare (“Jane quietly watched an English robin at her window for days and weeks”), and the artwork, with its strong colors and flat shapes, almost childlike.
The qualities of patience and observation she displayed as a child serve her well as a primatologist. Rather than assigning numbers to chimpanzees and studying their behavior from a distance, she immersed herself in the life of a chimpanzee troop, gradually winning its members’ trust. Her research methods were unconventional. But Goodall actually went on to study under the famed anthropologist Louis Leakey, and to work in Tanzania. Even as a young girl, Goodall dreamed she would one day travel to Africa and become a naturalist - not an unusual childhood fantasy. Jane” and “The Watcher,” help fill the gap, and both, wisely, connect Goodall’s childhood to her later achievements. When you consider Jane Goodall’s happy British childhood, largely spent outdoors and filled with horses, dogs, chickens and pet turtles - earthworms tucked beneath her pillow at night - and her adult life as the world’s pre-eminent authority on chimpanzees and an influential conservationist, you can’t help wondering: why haven’t there been more biographies of Goodall for young readers?
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