Jane Goodall died on October 1, 2025 at the age of 91.  Born to a middle class family in London, she had a distinguished career as a zoologist, environmentalist, teacher and inspiration to thousands of young people.  The recipient of many honors and awards including the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2025 and being named a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2004.

The author of 32 books and the subject of more than 40 films, Goodall transformed herself from a shy, bookish 23 year old graduate of secretarial school into a world expert and activist for the environment, animals, and all living things.  Starting with her bold move to Africa to work with Louia Leakey in 1960 where she did ground-breaking work on the behavior, social skills, and tool-making of the chimpanzees of Gombe in Tanzania and progressing to be one of only 8 students to earn a PhD at Cambridge without a college degree, Goodall spent her life breaking barriers and stretching boundaries.

Her Jane Goodall Institute founded in 1977 and her youth organization Roots & Shoots founded in 1991 have taken her message all over the world, and she became a speaker on behalf of the natural world at colloquia from Davos to the U.N.  She remained active right up until her death in her sleep while visiting friends in California.

“The Book of Hope:  A Survival Guide for Trying Times” presents a series of conversations between Jane and Douglas Abrams.  Abrams is an editor, film producer, novelist, and creative whose prior book “The Book of Joy” recorded conversations between him, Desmond Tutu, and the Dalai Lama.  His collaboration with Jane Goodall over four meetings between 2018 and 2020 occurred in Bournemouth UK, Tanzania, the Netherlands, and via Zoom due to COVID.

I am, in general a skeptic about feel good, save the world books, but this one really worked for me. Goodall is quite wonderful—smart, articulate, funny, passionate, informed, humble, and driven by HOPE to do everything she can to motivate world leaders and young people to take action to save the planet.  Global warming, mass extinctions, loss of biological diversity, hunger, natural disasters are all acknowledged, but don’t lead Goodall to despair.  Rather, they stoke her passion for action.  Taking his role as provocateur seriously, Abrams’ persistent attempts to challenge her message of hope as naive fail as Goodall’s realistic sincerity shines through.

She bases her hope on two major pillars.  First, her faith in human intellect, nature’s resilience, the power of young people and the indomitable human spirit enable her to think that we actually can turn things around. Second, she says she has to hope because the alternative is so bleak and grim—depression, destruction, etc.  One has to wonder how her fierce hope would have fared in the face of the first year of the second trump administration and its anti-environment, anti-climate change, America First policies.

Part of my enjoyment of this book derived from listening to the audiobook for perhaps 1/4 of it.  Goodall’s voice, energy, spirit, and passion come through loud and clear, in a way that reading would not have led to.  If you choose to ‘read’ this book, I’d urge you to listen to the audio version.

When Jane Goodall died this year, the world lost a true treasure of a human being, an activist, and a leader.  We will miss her.