Ask Now the Beasts: Our Kinship with Animals Wild and Domestic Book

Don't bother with this book, I was very disappointed in what I read. From the very beginning she mixes up what is fact and what is not, for example when talking about the genetic similarities between chimps and humans, she states "In 2006 Harvard geneticist David Reich discovered evidence that we share a common ancestor, the product of sexual relations between humans and chimpanzees."(pg. 9) This is speculation, but she is stating it as fact. It is also total crap. There has never been any cross breeding between humans and chimpanzees, it is not genetically possible. There has, however, been possible cross-breeding between different species of early man (eg. homo sapiens & homo neandertalensis). Maybe she was simply mixed up? We evolved from common ancestors, that is why we're so similar. And to believe that (and write in a book!) we're the result of an ape-man mating tells me that she is completely uneducated in the process of evolution. And her reference for this "fact"? An article from the New York Times. She also goes out of her way to bash Roger Fouts repeatedly, even straying from the story for pages at a time to do so. She has never, to my knowledge, met or even talked to him. She repeatedly praises William Lemmon, a man well known for his cruelty to chimps and other animals. I could not figure out why she was making him out to be a hero and Fouts to be a jerk, but then in the back I found that many of her photos and references came from Lemmons son. It is obvious from the beginning that she has no background in biology, genetics, animal husbandry, or chimpanzees. And if I were just a random person reading this book, I wouldn't know how much of what she is claiming is actually untrue -I would have taken it as fact (as it is presented as such). This upsets me greatly because her false ideas and views are now in the hands of many people (the book was promoted in magazines including Cosmopolitan as a "must read"). I have been studying and working with animals including chimpanzees for over 11 years, and this is the first time I have read a book about primates where I have had to mark multiple pages to research on my own because I knew the statements made could not possibly be true. She should have used the classic line "story based on real events" rather than non-fiction, for this would excuse her mess of a story. She has written the book based on accounts from people, and we all know everyone sees and remembers events differently from others who have experienced the same event- especially 40 years later. Please, if you have read this book, read others that are based less gossip and more on research, like "Through A Window" by Jane Goodall, and "Next of Kin" by Roger Fouts.