Animal Magnetism

JANE GOODALL The Woman Who Redefined Man By Dale Peterson | Mariner. 740 pp. $17.95

The soft-focus portrait on the cover is the first hint that Jane Goodall, Dale Peterson's biography of the celebrated primatologist and animal-rights activist, is more intimate than academic. Peterson, who collaborated with Goodall on several books, including two collections of her letters, deftly integrates her personal writings and her scientific accomplishments in this comprehensive, engaging life story. Exhaustive in its detail (we learn, for example, that among Goodall's numerous childhood pets was a tortoise named Johnny Walker whose shell was painted bright red so it could be spotted easily), the book at times stretches the reader's need to know. Peterson isn't shy about his admiration for his subject, and the Goodall who emerges from the book's many pages is bold, tenacious and, at least in the early chapters, humble. "I just squat here, chimp-like," she writes in a 1961 letter home from Tanzania, "and laugh to think of this unknown 'Miss Goodall' who is said to be doing scientific research somewhere."

Despite his own tendencies, Peterson cautions against the temptation to idealize Goodall or to compartmentalize her achievements "as the revolutionary consequence of a feminine approach to sterile old masculine science." Her unorthodox approach to studying chimpanzees may have contributed to her discoveries, but "the real force" behind her success, he contends, can be attributed to a more universal ethic: "a determined struggle against seriously adverse conditions and a seemingly boundless capacity for slogging, dogged, hard work."

BEING CARIBOU Five Months on Foot With an Arctic HerdBy Karsten Heuer | Milkweed. 237 pp. $15

Following a herd of migrating caribou through the Yukon and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge may not be everyone's ideal honeymoon, but in 2003 newlyweds Karsten Heuer and Leanne Allison found their own kind of romance on just such a journey. "We'd become caribou: content in our suffering, secure in our insecurity, fully exercising the wildness that had been buried within us all along," writes Heuer in Being Caribou, his eloquent account of the adventure. Spanning three seasons and more than 1,000 miles, the grueling trip tested the couple's will (and young marriage) as they faced, among other obstacles, sub-zero temperatures, a nasty blizzard and multiple encounters with wolves and grizzly bears. But Heuer, a wildlife biologist, and Allison, a filmmaker who captured the voyage in a documentary of the same title, were buoyed by a mission beyond thrill-seeking: to argue on behalf of the caribou in the debate over development in the refuge. The book has the bite of a political tract but is most effective in its quieter moments, as when Heuer describes the herd, moving "like a giant inkblot, seeming to float more than flee, drifting farther into a checkerboard of shadow and light."

From Our Previous Reviews

· "Part historiography, part travelogue, part memoir," Andrew Ferguson's Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe's America (Grove, $14), an irreverent tour of all things Lincoln, is also "part indictment -- if not of Lincoln, then of some of the modern Americans who devote themselves to preserving his reputation and memory," Harold Holzer wrote.

· The God of Spring (Simon & Schuster, $15), by Arabella Edge, a fictional retelling of the painter Théodore Géricault's creation of "The Raft of the Medusa," is "a gripping novel of artistic obsession," Ron Charles commented.

· More than 50 years in the making, Hugh Brogan's Alexis de Tocqueville: A Life (Yale, $20), Joseph J. Ellis said, is "a magisterial account" that "follows the precocious French nobleman through the swirling history of post-revolutionary France, the rutted roads of backwoods America, the bewildering comings and goings of different royalist and republican French governments, all the way to Tocqueville's somewhat controversial final hours in 1859."

· Hermione Lee's "thorough and intelligent" biography Edith Wharton (Vintage $18.95) demonstrates "the full range of Wharton's writing and the full power of her energy," Diane Johnson noted.

Nora Krug is a regular contributor to Book World.