Review of “The Book of Hope” by Jane Goodall and Douglas Abrams, pub. Viking 2021
Hope is often misunderstood. People tend to think that it is simply passive wishful thinking: I hope something will happen but I’m not going to do anything about it.
If I’m reviewing a book from a few years back, and one which must have been reviewed by the press at the time (though I confess it completely passed me by), it’s because a book advocating hope seemed rather apposite at a time when there’s a great deal of pessimism and despair about, much of it justified. In the event, I have very mixed views about it. Jane Goodall has long travelled the world giving talks about conservation, urging people not to be discouraged by the size of the problems from doing what they can. She has demonstrably done a lot of good, with initiatives like Roots & Shoots, designed to encourage individual and community action, and she is right to say that pessimism and despair can, in effect, become an excuse for doing nothing.
This book, however, is an infuriating mix of truly inspiring stories of positive action, anecdotes masquerading as evidence, wishful thinking, the sentimental and the genuinely moving, practical initiatives, interesting information and “spiritual” baloney. I don’t think it is helped by the narrative method, which involved Abrams conducting a series of interviews with Goodall. For one thing, this encourages the inclusion of much irrelevant detail – “There was coconut rice served with a creamy Swahili bean sauce; lentils and peas with a hint of ground peanuts, curry, and coriander; and sautéed spinach”: well, fascinating if you like menus, but nothing to do with the book’s theme.
Also, in order for the reader to feel the dialogue is going somewhere, Abrams feels obliged to be constantly surprised and enlightened by whatever Goodall is saying, even when one might think it was so obvious that he must surely have stumbled on the idea before. “Doesn’t it feel like a drop in the ocean, given the overwhelming autocracy or tyranny that people are facing around the world?” “But millions of drops actually make the ocean.” I smiled. Hope, checkmate.” There is too much of this: “I was beginning to see what Jane meant about the tapestry of life and the interconnection between all species.”, “Jane smiled and nodded her head, like an elder who was passing on the secrets of life and survival. I was beginning to understand.”
Often the dialogue simply feels forced and unnatural, as when they are swapping examples of political activism:
“Yes,” Jane said, “think of the early suffragette movement in England, led by Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst, when the women tied themselves to the railings outside the House of Commons as they fought for women’s right to vote. And think of the number of people, all over the world, who have tied themselves to trees, or climbed up into the branches, to try to protect a forest from the bulldozers.” “Another inspiring example is Standing Rock,” I said…” This goes on for a while.
When Goodall focuses on practical initiatives, however, the book is genuinely informative and sometimes inspiring. In China, Jia Haixia, who is blind, and Jia Wenqi, who has no legs, have together planted more than ten thousand trees to help heal the degraded and polluted land surrounding their village. Roots & Shoots, originally founded in a Tanzanian school to convince children that everyone could make a difference in the world, proved its worth when a visitor to a refugee camp noticed a strange difference in one area: “It was depressing, he said—bare earth, people with vacant expressions, children sitting listlessly outside their huts. He continued walking through the camp, and then suddenly he came to a section of the camp where the atmosphere changed. Children were running around and laughing. Hens foraged in a patch of land where grass had been allowed to grow. A few teenagers were working in a small vegetable garden.” The people in that area had been through the Roots & Shoots programme and were not inclined to sit around despondently waiting for something to happen.
There are many such stories, and they make a good point. But there is also a degree of wishful thinking, nowhere more evident than in this passage – the book was published in 2021, remember…
“Jane didn’t miss a beat. “That’s true. But it’s going to be the twenty-year-olds and thirty-year-olds who will vote in the right president.” Once again, Jane was prescient. Eleven months later, an increase in young voter turnout would help vote out Donald Trump, who had pulled the United States out of the Paris Agreement, and elect Joe Biden—and one of the first major acts of his presidency would be to rejoin the Paris Agreement and recommit to building a healthier economy and planet.”
To which one can only say, whoops…. And I’ve checked; the young vote, especially among young men, turned trumpwards and they named the economy and their personal finances as the biggest issue. So much for their ecological concerns. A quotation in the book from Desmond Tutu, “the human race takes two steps forward and one back”, seems more realistic. I could also really do without the sentimentality (far too many mentions of “tears”) and the mystic/spiritual shtick. “Somebody or some unknown power looking after me up there,” Jane said, glancing up. “That sort of thing has happened before.” She seems to have convinced herself that there is no such thing as coincidence – “Was it coincidence that put us next to each other on that plane that neither of us should have been on— and that we had the last two seats? If I had not initiated a conversation that opportunity would have been lost.” Abrams, moreover, deems not to notice that her statement, “But I don’t believe in fate or destiny. I believe in free choice,” is in flat contradiction to her evident belief in some mysterious guiding power. Nor does he ever ask why this unknown power is not “looking after” others in the same way. He does reflect, “As I thought about these stories, I realized we had left the realm of science”, but it doesn’t seem to bother him.
I’ve no doubt many readers would mind the spirituality, the sometimes fuzzy logic and the tears less than I do. I’ve no quarrel with the book’s message, but I think there are better ways to deliver it.
