Encountering Gorillas

Encountering Gorillas PDF Author: James L. Newman
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 1442219572
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
Gorillas, the largest of the apes inhabiting our planet, have been a source of fear, awe, and inspiration to humans. In this book, James L. Newman brings a lifetime of study of Africa to his compelling story of the rich and varied interaction between gorillas and humans since earliest contact. He illuminates the complex relationship over time through the interlinked themes of discovery, exploitation, understanding, and continuing survival. Tragically, the number of free-living gorillas—facing habitat loss, disease, and poaching—has declined dramatically over the course of the past century, and the future of the few that remain is highly uncertain. At the same time, those in zoos and sanctuaries now lead much more secure lives than they did earlier. Newman follows this transition, highlighting the roles played by key individuals, both humans and gorillas. Among the former have been adventurers, opportunists, writers, and scientists. The latter include real gorillas, such as Gargantua and Koko, and fictional ones, notably King Kong and Mighty Joe Young. This thoughtful and engaging book helps us understand how our image of gorillas has been both distorted and clarified through culture and science for centuries and how we now control the destiny of these magnificent great apes.

Encountering Gorillas

Encountering Gorillas PDF Author: James L. Newman
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 1442219572
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 221

Get Book

Book Description
Gorillas, the largest of the apes inhabiting our planet, have been a source of fear, awe, and inspiration to humans. In this book, James L. Newman brings a lifetime of study of Africa to his compelling story of the rich and varied interaction between gorillas and humans since earliest contact. He illuminates the complex relationship over time through the interlinked themes of discovery, exploitation, understanding, and continuing survival. Tragically, the number of free-living gorillas—facing habitat loss, disease, and poaching—has declined dramatically over the course of the past century, and the future of the few that remain is highly uncertain. At the same time, those in zoos and sanctuaries now lead much more secure lives than they did earlier. Newman follows this transition, highlighting the roles played by key individuals, both humans and gorillas. Among the former have been adventurers, opportunists, writers, and scientists. The latter include real gorillas, such as Gargantua and Koko, and fictional ones, notably King Kong and Mighty Joe Young. This thoughtful and engaging book helps us understand how our image of gorillas has been both distorted and clarified through culture and science for centuries and how we now control the destiny of these magnificent great apes.

Gorilla Society

Gorilla Society PDF Author: Alexander H. Harcourt
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226316041
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 958

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Book Description
Societies develop as a result of the interactions of individuals as they compete and cooperate with one another in the evolutionary struggle to survive and reproduce successfully. Gorilla society is arranged according to these different and sometimes conflicting evolutionary goals of the sexes. In seeking to understand why gorilla society exists as it does, Alexander H. Harcourt and Kelly J. Stewart bring together extensive data on wild gorillas, collected over decades by numerous researchers working in diverse habitats across Africa, to illustrate how the social system of gorillas has evolved and endured. Gorilla Society introduces recent theories explaining primate societies, describes gorilla life history, ecology, and social systems, and explores both sexes’ evolutionary strategies of survival and reproduction. With a focus on the future, Harcourt and Stewart conclude with suggestions for future research and conservation. An exemplary work of socioecology from two of the world’s best known gorilla biologists, Gorilla Society will be a landmark study on a par with the work of George Schaller—a synthesis of existing research on these remarkable animals and the societies in which they live.

Gorillas in the Mist

Gorillas in the Mist PDF Author: Dian Fossey
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780618083602
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
Presents thirteen years of field research on the endangered mountain gorilla of the African rain forest.

Face to Face with Gorillas

Face to Face with Gorillas PDF Author: Michael Nichols
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 1426304064
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 36

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Book Description
Nick Nichols and Mike Fay take you deep into the heart of the African jungle to meet a gorilla face to face.

Gorillas

Gorillas PDF Author: Lori McManus
Publisher: Heinemann-Raintree Library
ISBN: 1432958631
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 50

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Book Description
Examines gorillas, including their physiology, anatomy, habitat, and behavior.

Colonial Transactions

Colonial Transactions PDF Author: Florence Bernault
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478002662
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
In Colonial Transactions Florence Bernault moves beyond the racial divide that dominates colonial studies of Africa. Instead, she illuminates the strange and frightening imaginaries that colonizers and colonized shared on the ground. Bernault looks at Gabon from the late nineteenth century to the present, historicizing the most vivid imaginations and modes of power in Africa today: French obsessions with cannibals, the emergence of vampires and witches in the Gabonese imaginary, and the use of human organs for fetishes. Struggling over objects, bodies, agency, and values, colonizers and colonized entered relations that are better conceptualized as "transactions." Together they also shared an awareness of how the colonial situation broke down moral orders and forced people to use the evil side of power. This foreshadowed the ways in which people exercise agency in contemporary Africa, as well as the proliferation of magical fears and witchcraft anxieties in present-day Gabon. Overturning theories of colonial and postcolonial nativism, this book is essential reading for historians and anthropologists of witchcraft, power, value, and the body.

In the Kingdom of Gorillas

In the Kingdom of Gorillas PDF Author: Bill Weber
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0743200071
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
Chronicles the attempts of the authors to protect and study the mountain gorillas of Rwanda, discussing the foundation of the Mountain Gorilla Project as well as the ecological and political situation of Rwanda.

Gorilla Dawn

Gorilla Dawn PDF Author: Gill Lewis
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1481486578
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
-Originally published in Great Britain in 2015 by Oxford University Press.---Verso.

Gorillas

Gorillas PDF Author: Stephan Brewer
Publisher: Gareth Stevens Publishing LLLP
ISBN: 1433940132
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 50

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Book Description
Easy-to-read text and full-color photographs depict the physical characteristics, habitat, and life cycle of gorillas.

Gorilla

Gorilla PDF Author: Ted Gott
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1780230672
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
Since coming to international prominence in the mid-nineteenth century when English, French, and American scientists first encountered them, the gorilla’s physical resemblance to humans has struck a deep chord. Gorillas quickly came to dominate evolutionary debates and grew prevalent in literature, art, film, and popular culture—they are the focus of movies such as Congo and the inspiration for the video game character Donkey Kong and DC Comics super villain Gorilla Grodd. In Gorilla, Ted Grott and Kathryn Weir provide a compelling and unsettling account of our relationship with these highly intelligent animals as they fight extinction due to habitat destruction, commercial hunting, and disease. Gott and Weir describe how early European observations of gorillas in their native Africa were the genesis of literary and artistic representations such as King Kong. At the same time, gorillas became symbolic of sexuality and subconscious, uncontrolled urges, and influenced theories of criminality. It was not until Dian Fossey’s research in the 1960s and 1970s that many misconceptions about the gorilla—especially their violence—were dispelled. A notable history of the gorilla’s influence on our culture and its plight at the hands of humans, Gorilla will appeal to any animal lover wanting to learn more about this noble creature and its uncertain future.