Staff Picks (April 13): Primates HC

Publisher: First Second Books

More often than not, a really good story leaves you wanting a little more. Primates inspires that longing for further adventures—and because it’s nonfictional, you can actually find them!

Primates: The Fearless Science of Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Birute Galdikas is an engaging look at three very important scientists who enthusiastically left comfortable lives to follow their intellectual passions in the field. These three women individually made their lives’ work by living in campsites, climbing mountains barefoot before dawn, and wading through swamps with machetes.

At the same time, they acted as emissaries, bringing groundbreaking new information to the scientific community’s understanding of chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans—in some cases, while lobbying with foreign governments to protect the animals and habitats they studied.

Written by much-admired science comics author Jim Ottaviani (Feynman) and illustrated with sensitive scale and pacing by Maris Wicks, Primates piqued my curiosity about primatology and sent me in search of these scientists’ further writings. Isn’t that the single best thing a graphic novel about science could do?

~ Kate Henning