Overview

For thirteen years Dian Fossey lived and worked with Uncle Bert, Flossie, Beethoven, Pantsy and Digit in the remote rain forests of the volcanic Virunga Mountains in Africa, establishing an unprecedented relationship with these shy and affectionate beasts. In her base camp, 10,000 feet above sea-level, she struggled daily with rain, loneliness and the ever-constant threat of poachers who slaughtered her beloved gorillas with horrifying ferocity. African adventure, personal quest and scientific study, Gorillas in the Mist is a unique and intimate glimpse into a vanishing world and a vanishing species.

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A fascinating combination of breathtaking adventure and absolute devotion to a cause. -- Farley Mowat

One of the year's bestsellers ... I recommend her book * The Times * Knuckle-walking, crouching, crawling and vocalizing in the Virungas, Dr Fossey was winning the hearts of scores of gorillas ... Fascinating -- Paul Theroux * Sunday Times *

Fossey's first African safari, in 1963, was motivated by a dream - to see the mountain gorillas of the Virunga Volcanoes and to meet Dr. Louis Leakey at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. She disgraced herself with the Leakeys by tripping and then vomiting (from the pain of a broken ankle) on their precious fossils; and on her first venture into the bush, she was dependent on rudimentary tracking lessons from her African assistant, and on the presence and elementary camping advice of an English photographer. Nevertheless she was chosen by Dr. Leakey to carry out a long-term field study of the mountain gorilla, and well repaid his faith during her 13 years of observation and conservation activism. Here, Fossey tells the interrelated story of the five gorilla groups with whom she established rapport and the poachers with whom she did perpetual battle, demolishing their traps and pursuing them to justice whenever she could. After becoming especially well acquainted with the gorillas she designated Group 4, observing their affectionate interplay and getting to know their individual natures, it is shocking to confront the death and mutilation of their engaging sentry Digit and, later, the similar fates of silverback (dominant male) Uncle Bert and mother Macho, all of whom died in an attempt to protect the infant Kweli from capture. (Kweli, shot in the head, died later.) Fossey traced these murders, which effected the breakup of Group 4, to the Rwandese Park Conservator, who used his post to acquire gorillas for a European zoo. As ten or more gorillas are captured for every one acquired for a zoo, as three times as many are taken as are born in captivity, and as more die than are born in captivity, Fossey has no use for the captivity-to-conserve-the-species argument. Her defense of her beloved gorillas is far from sentimental, and along with the dignity of the silverback leaders, the impish charm of the young, and the impressive kinship bonds and group cohesiveness, she reports instances of infanticide, abuse of the weak, and evidence of cannibalism - along with such un-fastidious behavior as dung eating, a common habit with probable nutritional benefits. In addition to the tragic Group 4, she reports on a thriving Group 5, two other Groups which disintegrated upon the natural deaths of their silverbacks, and, in a final chapter with hope in the title, the formation of a new group around a lone silverback stranger who appeared after the decimation of Group 4 and acquired its surviving members (along with other strays, steals, and survivors). Despite this heartening example, Fossey's closing figures of human population growth seem to offer little hope for the gorilla population, which had been cut in half in the few years between George Schaller's landmark study and her own. But, as she says early on, I am grateful that I knew this region even as late as 1967, for it will never be the same. Whatever the mountain gorillas' future, their immediate past is here in Fossey's vibrant and invaluable study. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Dr Dian Fossey was the world authority on the endangered mountain gorilla. As founder and coordinator of the Karisoke Research Center, Dr Fossey spent thirteen years in the remote rain forests of the volcanic Virunga Mountains. Working from a base camp ten thousand feet above sea level, she struggled with agoraphobia on forty-five degree slopes, torrential rains, hail and fog, foot-deep mud, poachers and revolution. She went to the USA in 1980 as a visiting associate professor of Cornell University, New York. Her memoir, GORILLAS IN THE MIST, was first published in 1983, and adapted as a film starring Sigourney Weaver in 1988. Dr Fossey was murdered in Rwanda in December 1985.

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