In the Shadow of Man
Jane Goodall's first-person account of her first decade among the wild chimpanzees of Gombe Stream, Tanzania, beginning in 1960 — the fieldwork that produced the discoveries of chimpanzee tool-making, meat-eating, and individual personality, told through named chimpanzees like David Greybeard, Flo, and Goliath. Page count is for the current Mariner Books Classics paperback (ISBN 9780547334165, introduction by Stephen Jay Gould), verified at 400 pages via both the Amazon product listing and OpenLibrary.
The chimpanzees who turn up in camp were lured there with bananas, a method the book itself lays out, and one reader calls it "the most egregious thing that Goodall did," "a frightful bit of scholarship." What follows those camp scenes is "just very research heavy," observation logged rather than shaped, and the science inside it has aged: even an admiring reader concedes the ethological information is "dated, given the rapid advances of the natural sciences today." Goodall herself stays off the page, so when day-to-day primate behavior is not your subject, there is no second thread to hold. One reader, who thinks the world of Goodall, closes with "I wished I enjoyed monkeys more."
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
