The most recommended books about chimpanzees

Who picked these books? Meet our 48 experts.

48 authors created a book list connected to chimpanzees, and here are their favorite chimpanzee books.
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Book cover of Basketry and Beyond: Constructing Cultures

Mary Schoeser Author Of World Textiles

From my list on getting you hooked on textile histories.

Why am I passionate about this?

It seems I was destined to write about textiles. Long after I started documenting the tapestries of the Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh—over 45 years ago—I discovered that my great-grandfather was a cotton mule-spinner, working one of those machines that spurred on the industrial revolution. So it’s in my blood. I’ve interviewed dozens of people who’ve made similar discoveries, and have become a firm believer in the long-lasting inherited significance of textiles. We’ve made them and they in turn have made us who we are. Now more than ever, my hope is to entangle people into the wonderful web that connects every era and every culture.

Mary's book list on getting you hooked on textile histories

Mary Schoeser Why did Mary love this book?

If you’re interested in the origins of creative thought, this is the book for you. Baskets are key, it turns out, in the connections now made between humans and the tool- and nest-making birds and chimpanzees. Containing, yes, but holding so much more than “stuff”, baskets from around the world are holders of pattern recognition, histories, and even wisdom.

By T.A. Heslop (editor), Helen Anderson (editor),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Basketry and Beyond as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.


Book cover of Grumpy Monkey

Jessica Sinarski Author Of Hello, Anger

From my list on children’s stories about anger.

Why am I passionate about this?

I have always been a peacemaker, so anger can be a really uncomfortable emotion for me. I think that’s true of lots of people! As a mom and mental health counselor, it was important to me to write a book that honored the protective nature of anger. Feelings give us important information. Putting this book together felt like a big puzzle to solve, and I’m so happy with how it turned out. Bright and engaging illustrations, relatable characters, and tips for grown-ups in the back to help us all say hello to our anger and whatever might be hiding underneath! 

Jessica's book list on children’s stories about anger

Jessica Sinarski Why did Jessica love this book?

What a delightful book on every level. Brilliant illustrations, relatable story, and it encourages sweet relationships even through difficult emotions. It’s great for 4-7-year-old children, playfully showing that even the best advice about helping people with big feelings doesn’t always meet the need…at least not as much as a little connection with someone who “gets it.” 

By Suzanne Lang, Max Lang (illustrator),

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Grumpy Monkey as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it. This book is for kids age 3, 4, and 5.

What is this book about?

A hilarious and reassuring New York Times Number 1 bestseller about feeling your emotions - sometimes it's okay not to feel okay!

Meet Jim Panzee.

He's in a BAD mood.
Nothing feels right!
Nothing will do, and Jim just doesn't know why...

His friends give him tips and suggest things that make THEM feel happy, however poor old Jim gets overwhelmed and snaps . . .

Could it be that he just needs a day to feel grumpy?

This modern classic is the perfect reminder that 'grumpy monkey' days never last for ever.


Book cover of A Beautiful Truth

Robert Repino Author Of Morte

From my list on animals becoming sentient.

Why am I passionate about this?

In addition to writing novels, I’m a humanities editor for Oxford University Press. So, I’m interested in the political and theological implications of non-human intelligence. I wonder how people would react to such a revelation. Some would be fascinated by this radical new perspective. Others would be horrified at what they perceive as a transgression against nature. I’m also drawn to this topic because I still vividly recall the entertainment of my youth, which regularly featured anthropomorphic animals. Sometimes they’re just cool or funny. But on occasion—like with The Secret of NIMH—they raise profound questions of identity and rebellion, even for an audience that is too young to understand.

Robert's book list on animals becoming sentient

Robert Repino Why did Robert love this book?

A childless couple adopts a chimpanzee named Looee, and you already know from reading that sentence that it will lead to trouble and heartbreak. After a few pages, I didn’t care. In McAdam’s skilled hands, the inevitable sadness doesn’t matter, because the delicately handled point of view perfectly captures a doomed creature trapped between two opposing identities. In contrast, we also meet Podo, an alpha chimp at a research facility seeking to test the intelligence of primates. Podo is fully ape, but he is turning into something more. Their paths soon join, taking them deeper into a gray area between human and animal that I had never seen rendered on the page so vividly before. 

By Colin McAdam,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked A Beautiful Truth as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Walt and Judy's happiness has been blighted by their childlessness; although their marriage seems blissful, Judy feels increasingly empty and Walt longs to make her happy again. So one day he brings home Looee - a baby chimpanzee. Looee, exuberant and demanding, immediately fills the gap in Walt and Judy's life, and they come to love him as their own son. Like any child, Looee is affectionate and quick to learn, generous and engaging. But he is also a deeply unpredictable animal, and one night their unique family life is changed forever.
At the Girdish Institute, chimpanzees have been studied…


Book cover of Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes

Rick Shenkman Author Of Political Animals: How Our Stone-Age Brain Gets in the Way of Smart Politics

From my list on why voters often behave irrationally.

Why am I passionate about this?

Rick Shenkman is a New York Times bestselling author, historian, and journalist who, after reading and writing history books for 40 years, decided to spend the past decade discovering what social scientists have to say. To his great joy, he learned that since he had last studied their work in college they had come to a vast new understanding of human political behavior. He now uses their insights into political psychology, evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and genetics to help explain our fucked up politics.

Rick's book list on why voters often behave irrationally

Rick Shenkman Why did Rick love this book?

This is a highly readable and fun book published back in 1982 by one of the leading primatologists of our era. A close student of ape behavior, Frans de Waal shows how smart apes are and what we can learn about ourselves by studying their behavior. He demonstrates that, contrary to common belief, it is not by physical strength alone that an alpha ape hangs onto its power at the top of the social pyramid. More important than their muscles is their ability to form coalitions with others.  

If your mental image of an alpha ape is a brawny male, forget it. De Waal profiles one female ape, Mama, who manages for years to dominate a group by exercising power more prudently than her male rivals, who shriek and throw tantrums when they don't get their way. This is the good news. The bad news is that apes are Machiavellian.…

By Franz DeWaal,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked Chimpanzee Politics as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The first edition of Frans de Waal's Chimpanzee Politics was acclaimed not only by primatologists for its scientific achievement but also by politicians, business leaders, and social psychologists for its remarkable insights into the most basic human needs and behaviors. Twenty-five years later, this book is considered a classic. Featuring a new preface that includes recent insights from the author, this anniversary edition is a detailed and thoroughly engrossing account of rivalries and coalitions-actions governed by intelligence rather than instinct. As we watch the chimpanzees of Arnhem behave in ways we recognize from Machiavelli (and from the nightly news), de…


Book cover of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

Dennis Danvers Author Of The Soothsayer & the Changeling

From my list on transform how we see ourselves in the world.

Why am I passionate about this?

My first true religion was being a boy alone in the woods and feeling a deep connection to nature in all its aspects. I felt a connection with all life and knew myself to be an animal—and gloried in it. Since then, I've learned how vigorously humans fight our animal nature, estranging us from ourselves and the planet. Each of these books invites us to get over ourselves and connect with all life on Earth. 

Dennis' book list on transform how we see ourselves in the world

Dennis Danvers Why did Dennis love this book?

I loved how the novel doesn't reveal right away what it is truly about but lets it dawn on you and then invites you into a moving family story. Another tale of humans and apes, it made me feel the joys and repercussions of deep bonds across species and between siblings.

I was moved by a family that begins as a scientific experiment, struggling to find love and justice and what we like to call humanity, though maybe we need to find another word.

By Karen Joy Fowler,

Why should I read it?

10 authors picked We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The New York Times bestselling author of The Jane Austen Book Club introduces a middle-class American family that is ordinary in every way but one in this novel that won the PEN/Faulkner Award and was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize.
 
Meet the Cooke family: Mother and Dad, brother Lowell, sister Fern, and Rosemary, who begins her story in the middle. She has her reasons. “I was raised with a chimpanzee,” she explains. “I tell you Fern was a chimp and already you aren’t thinking of her as my sister. But until Fern’s expulsion...she was my twin, my funhouse…


Book cover of Reason for Hope

Gary Kowalski Author Of Goodbye, Friend: Healing Wisdom for Anyone Who Has Ever Lost a Pet

From my list on love, loss and our kinship with animals.

Why am I passionate about this?

I called my dog Chinook my spiritual guide. He makes friends easily and doesn’t hold a grudge. He enjoys simple pleasures, taking each day as it comes. On his own canine level, he shows me that it might be possible to live without inner conflicts or neuroses: uncomplicated, genuine and glad to be alive.”  Chinook inspired my first book, The Souls of Animals, which explored the capacities for love, creativity, and compassion we humans share with other species. As an ordained minister (Harvard Divinity School), I believe we desperately need to rediscover our spiritual affinity with other living creatures if we are to save our small planet.

Gary's book list on love, loss and our kinship with animals

Gary Kowalski Why did Gary love this book?

Goodall is part scholar and part saint, a scientist seer. When her husband Derek Bryceson died after a protracted battle with cancer, Jane was spiritually bereft. Following a bleak year of grief, she encountered a mystical moment of healing.  “It seemed to me, as I struggled afterward to recall the experience, that self was utterly absent: I and the chimpanzees, the earth and trees and air, seemed to merge, to become one with the spirit power of life itself.” In that window of altered understanding, time slowed. Perception sharpened. Space seemed more spacious. The forest and its wild creatures, she found, had given her the peace that passes understanding.

By Jane Goodall, Phillip Berman,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Reason for Hope as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Those who know Jane Goodall through her many books, speeches, and National Geographic television specials, know she is obviously no ordinary scientist. She is a genuinely spiritual woman who cares passionately about the preservation and enhancement of life in all its forms.Based upon the many spiritual experiences that have graced and shaped her outlook on life, Dr. Goodall is convinced there is a higher purpose to life, and that this purpose can best be served by a sense of reverence for creation- a commitment to opening our hearts and minds to the spiritual ties that bind us to the Earth.In…


Book cover of Brazzaville Beach

Pippa Goldschmidt Author Of Schrödinger's Wife (and Other Possibilities)

From my list on women doing science.

Why am I passionate about this?

Science is still assumed to be a ‘male’ subject in which women are a minority. I should know—I was one of those women when I worked as an astrophysicist. But there have always been women in science and their stories are fascinating, whether told in nonfiction or in fiction. Fiction is ideally placed to convey the emotions behind the scientific processes and the way in which human interactions and relationships influence what happens in the lab.

Pippa's book list on women doing science

Pippa Goldschmidt Why did Pippa love this book?

I adored this fascinating tale of scientists studying chimpanzees in Africa, intertwined with the story of a failing marriage between one of those scientists, Hope Clearwater, and her mathematician husband back in England.

Reading this book, I was engrossed in the interplay between the people and the chimps, the evocations of African and English landscapes, and the subtle way in which the struggle for power within the chimps’ territory is echoed by human conflict in the same country.

If this all sounds rather complicated, William Boyd is one of the best storytellers around, so I was effortlessly carried along by the gorgeous sentences.

By William Boyd,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked Brazzaville Beach as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Utterly engaging. A novel of ideas, of big themes.William Boyd is a champion storyteller. - New York Times Book Review William Boyd's classic Brazzaville Beach has been called as a bold seamless blend of philosophy and suspense [that] nevertheless remains accessible to general readers on a level of pure entertainment.(Boston Globe). Released to coincide with Boyd's latest novel, Ordinary Thunderstorms, Brazzaville Beach tells the story of a British primate-researcher who relocates to war-torn Africa in the wake of her husband's tragic descent into mental illness. Intense, exhilarating, and engrossing, Brazzaville Beach is rich in action and thought, and William Boyd,…


Book cover of Mr. Nobody's Eyes

Helen Laycock Author Of Glass Dreams

From my list on circus stories for readers eight and up.

Why am I passionate about this?

I remember reading Enid Blyton’s Mr. Galliano’s Circus as a child and was fascinated more by the idea of circus life than the actual performance aspect. I still adore watching high-quality circus feats performed by acrobats and love that frisson of excitement as everyone shuffles into their seats just before showtime. When I began writing children’s books, my aim was to give the child characters room to develop resilience and courage while encountering danger and adventure without the presence of adults. In order to do this, I had to somehow remove parental figures. Running away is the perfect literary device to achieve this which is how Glass Dreams came about.

Helen's book list on circus stories for readers eight and up

Helen Laycock Why did Helen love this book?

I’m a sucker for anything about chimps!

Set in post-war England, this charming story focuses on the relationship between 10-year-old Henry and Ocky, a mischievous chimpanzee he ‘accidentally’ steals from Mr Nobody at Blondini’s Circus.

After trouble at school and at home, and with the threat of having his secret friend discovered, Harry runs away with Ocky. Following a series of adventures, ending with a perilous situation at the seaside, Harry realises that not only is Ocky precious to Mr Nobody, but he is precious to his family too.

By Michael Morpurgo,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Mr. Nobody's Eyes as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A tale of fun and friendship from former Children's Laureate and author of War Horse, Michael Morpurgo.

Harry heard the key turn in the lock. He had already made up his mind to run.

Harry is in trouble at school, and doesn't like his stepfather or the new baby. Then he befriends Ocky, a chimpanzee from the circus. Ocky's owner won't mind if Harry borrows her for a bit, will he?

But then Harry's stepfather and the police find out. Harry and the chimp are soon on the run!

A gripping and poignant animal adventure from the master storyteller of…


Book cover of Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

Nancy Tomes Author Of The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life

From my list on get you ready for the next big pandemic.

Why am I passionate about this?

My passion for this topic dates back to my childhood and being impressed by the scary diseases and unhygienic toilets that were part of my family lore. I grew up to be a historian of medicine, which allowed me to indulge my interest in deadly diseases—at a safe historical distance! That curiosity led me to write the Gospel of Germs, a history of popular understandings of the germ theory of disease. Post-COVID, I am thinking about how to get ready for the next big pandemic that climate change and globalization will likely throw at us: will it be bird flu, dengue, mpox, or some new COVID variant?

Nancy's book list on get you ready for the next big pandemic

Nancy Tomes Why did Nancy love this book?

I love this book because Quammen looks at pandemics in terms of the changing relationships between humans and animals. A master of science writing, he explains how global economic and climate change is bringing us closer contact with many species in the wild—bats, parrots, chimpanzees—whose pathogens can “jump” to domestic animals (pigs and chickens). If you are worried about the bird flu, this is a great book to gain perspective on. 

By David Quammen,

Why should I read it?

5 authors picked Spillover as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In 2020, the novel coronavirus gripped the world in a global pandemic and led to the death of hundreds of thousands. The source of the previously unknown virus? Bats. This phenomenon-in which a new pathogen comes to humans from wildlife-is known as spillover, and it may not be long before it happens again.

Prior to the emergence of our latest health crisis, renowned science writer David Quammen was traveling the globe to better understand spillover's devastating potential. For five years he followed scientists to a rooftop in Bangladesh, a forest in the Congo, a Chinese rat farm, and a suburban…


Book cover of Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves

Richard G. Lipsey Author Of Economic Transformations: General Purpose Technologies and Long-Term Economic Growth

From Richard's 3 favorite reads in 2023.

Why am I passionate about this?

Author Emeritus professor Policy maker Policy analyst. Author Trans-Atlantic sailor

Richard's 3 favorite reads in 2023

Richard G. Lipsey Why did Richard love this book?

When in school I commented that my dog seemed angry with me, my teacher replied: “Don’t be anthropomorphic by erroneously ascribing human emotions to animals.”

The view of animals as unemotional automatons was the prevailing scientific view for decades, although we pet owners suspected otherwise. Then observers such as Jane Goodall and de Vaal showed that we were right all along, as shown in many of De Vaal’s books.

Mama’s Last Hug begins with an account of the mutual emotions expressed by de Vaal and the chimpanzee matriarch Mama when she hugged him from her death bed. The book recounts many heartwarming examples of chimpanzees and other animals expressing emotions.

Since we have common evolutionary ancestors with other animals: why should we ever have thought we were unique in having intelligence and emotions? 

By Frans de Waal,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Mama's Last Hug as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Mama's Last Hug is a fascinating exploration of the rich emotional lives of animals, beginning with Mama, a chimpanzee matriarch who formed a deep bond with biologist Jan van Hooff. Her story and others like it-from dogs "adopting" the injuries of their companions, to rats helping fellow rats in distress, to elephants revisiting the bones of their loved ones-show that humans are not the only species with the capacity for love, hate, fear, shame, guilt, joy, disgust, and empathy. Frans de Waal opens our hearts and minds to the many ways in which humans and other animals are connected.


Book cover of Basketry and Beyond: Constructing Cultures
Book cover of Grumpy Monkey
Book cover of A Beautiful Truth

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