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Through a Window: My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of Gombe by Jane Goodall — A Review

ByPeter

Jane Goodall died in October 2025 at 91. The tributes came in waves — conservation organizations, primatologists, heads of state — and they all said versions of the same thing: she changed how we see animals. What they were really saying is that she changed how we see ourselves. Through a Window, published in 1990 as her second major work on the Gombe chimpanzees, is where that transformation is most completely on the page. Not as argument, not as polemic, but as thirty years of lived observation rendered in prose that reads, as more than one critic has noted, like a novel you cannot put down.

I came to this book the way a lot of people probably do — sideways, through a love of zoos. My favorite is the Bronx Zoo, one of the great ones, and there is something about standing at the glass of a great ape exhibit that stops you in a way that other animals do not. The chimp or the gorilla looks back. There is consideration behind those eyes, an assessment happening. You feel it before you can explain it. Through a Window is the explanation.

What the Book Actually Is

This is not a popular science summary dressed up as memoir. It is the chronicle of a scientific community — the chimpanzee population at Gombe Stream National Park on the shores of Lake Tanganyika in Tanzania — told by the woman who watched them longer and more carefully than anyone in history. Goodall had written about her first decade at Gombe in her earlier book, In the Shadow of Man. Through a Window picks up the story and carries it through thirty years, covering births and deaths, political upheavals within the chimp hierarchy, and a four-year intergroup war that killed all the adult males of one community. These are not metaphors. This is what happened.

The title comes from Goodall’s own framing of her vantage point: she was always watching through a window, a pane of perception between two worlds. What the book ultimately argues is that the window is thinner than we think, and the world on the other side is not as foreign as we were taught.

The Animals Who Named Themselves

One of the first things Goodall did at Gombe was name the chimpanzees rather than number them, a practice that got her into direct conflict with the scientific establishment of the 1960s. Cambridge-trained ethologists believed that assigning names implied subjectivity, that a numbered specimen was safer territory than a named individual. Goodall held her ground, and the decades proved her right in the most undeniable way possible: the individuals mattered. Their personalities shaped outcomes.

Flo, the old matriarch — her status, her social intelligence, her warmth — produced sons who became alpha males. When Flo died, her adult son Flint, psychologically unable to separate from her, stopped eating within weeks and died shortly after. Goblin clawed his way to dominance through sheer aggression and strategic alliance-building. Jomeo, by contrast, lived without social ambition and seemed, in his own way, content. These are not anthropomorphic projections. These are behavioral patterns documented across decades of meticulous field notes. The question Goodall quietly asks throughout the book is not whether chimps feel. The question is whether we have any honest reason to believe they don’t.

Goodall’s research at Gombe challenged two long-standing beliefs: that only humans could construct and use tools, and that chimpanzees were vegetarians. When she witnessed David Greybeard stripping leaves from a twig and inserting it into a termite mound to fish for insects, she telegrammed her mentor, the paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey. His response has become one of the most quoted lines in twentieth-century science: “Now we must redefine tool, redefine man, or accept chimpanzees as human.” That was 1960. Through a Window is, among other things, the thirty-year elaboration of what Leakey meant.

The War Nobody Wanted to Believe

The chapters on the Gombe Chimp War are among the most disturbing in all of natural history writing — not because they are graphic (though they are frank), but because of what they imply. When the Kasakela community split into two groups in the early 1970s, the northern males began systematically hunting and killing every adult male from the southern Kahama group. Four years, all six southern adult males dead. The community’s territory absorbed. Then, in a twist almost Greek in its structure, a third, larger community swept in and took that territory in turn.

One of Goodall’s most remarkable observations became known as the Gombe Chimp War — a four-year-long conflict in which eight adult males from one community killed all six males of another community, taking over their territory, only to lose it to another, bigger community with even more males. Frans de Waal, the Dutch primatologist who spent decades studying primate social behavior, noted that Goodall’s reports of lethal inter-community violence profoundly shaped the post-war debate about the origins of human aggression. Here were chimps engaging in what could only be called warfare — coordinated, territorial, and deliberate. The scientific community resisted the finding for years, because accepting it meant accepting something uncomfortable about the roots of human violence.

Goodall does not moralize about this. She reports it. The restraint is the point.

What the Bronx Zoo Is Really Doing

Here is where I want to push back, gently, against a certain kind of zoo skepticism — the idea that a captive great ape is an animal diminished, a spectacle, a reduction of something that belongs only in the forest. I understand the argument. After reading Through a Window, the Gombe community becomes so vivid, their social landscape so intricate, that any enclosure feels like an abbreviation. And there are bad zoos, places where confinement is pure poverty.

But great institutions — and the Bronx Zoo, the Wildlife Conservation Society’s flagship, is one of them — are doing something more complicated. They are the place where millions of people who will never visit Tanzania first encounter the reality that these animals have faces, moods, relationships, and memory. Goodall herself became a conservationist because observation changed her. That process of change can begin at a zoo exhibit just as well as at a termite mound in Tanzania. The glass works both ways.

Goodall’s narrative emphasizes the importance of empowering local people to become stewards of their environment, ensuring a sustainable future for both humans and wildlife. But the pipeline of public support that makes conservation funding possible runs, in large part, through exactly the kind of affective encounter that a good zoo produces. You cannot care about what you have never seen. Goodall understood that better than anyone — she was, after all, a storyteller as much as a scientist.

The Complexity We Keep Underestimating

What Through a Window does better than any other book I know in this genre is resist the urge to simplify animals into either noble savages or mere instinct machines. The chimps of Gombe are neither. They are complicated. They comfort one another after fights. They play. They hold grudges for years. They grieve — Goodall documented behavioral depression in chimps who lost close companions, grief patterns recognizable to anyone who has experienced loss themselves. They also commit infanticide, cannibalism, and coordinated murder.

Chimpanzees and human DNA differs by roughly one percent, with chimps demonstrating similar cognitive abilities and emotional registers to humans. That one percent has produced language, philosophy, and the capacity to read a book like this one. It has also produced genocide, tribalism, and the destruction of the habitats that chimps and humans share. The mirror Goodall holds up is not flattering. It is honest.

I wrote about Dawkins’s Extended Phenotype in a piece on how genes build structures beyond the body, and there is a direct line from that genetic framework to what Goodall is documenting at the behavioral level. The gene’s-eye view and the observer’s-eye view arrive at the same unsettling conclusion: the line between us and our nearest relatives is a matter of degree, not of kind.

The Verdict

Through a Window is essential reading, full stop. Not because it is easy — some passages are genuinely hard, and the war chapters require a certain steadiness — but because it is true, and the truth it tells matters. If you have ever felt that pull of recognition at a zoo, that sense of something familiar looking back at you from behind the glass, this book is the fullest possible account of what that recognition means. Goodall spent thirty years at that window. We are lucky she wrote it all down.

Buy it on Amazon or find it at the Jane Goodall Institute’s own store.

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Peter Kalafatis

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