Ape

"White makes an intense emotional connection between subject and reader. . . . The great apes have found their John Singer Sargent." — Publishers Weekly (starred review) A Book Sense Children’s Pick A Bank Street College Best Children’s Book of the Year A New York Public Library: 100 Titles for Reading and Sharing Selection An ASPCA Henry Bergh Children’s Book Award Winner Swing with a hairy orangutan and her baby as they lunge for a smelly, spiky durian fruit. Roam and play with a gang of chimps, then poke out some tasty termites with a blade of grass. Chatter and feast on figs with a bonobo, or chomp on bamboo with a gorilla as he readies for sleep. What could be better than spending time with these rare and wonderful creatures — after all, the fifth great ape on this planet is you! Back matter includes an index and a map.

Annotation As Jane Goodall never fails to mention, "bush meat is the greatest conservation crisis in my lifetime." This book documents in text and photographs how wild animals in the Congo Basin, particularly the Great Apes but also chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas, are slaughtered and used for human consumption.

The Ape that Understood the Universe is the story of the strangest animal in the world: the human animal. It opens with a question: How would an alien scientist view our species? What would it make of our sex differences, our sexual behavior, our altruistic tendencies, and our culture? The book tackles these issues by drawing on two major schools of thought: evolutionary psychology and cultural evolutionary theory. The guiding assumption is that humans are animals, and that like all animals, we evolved to pass on our genes. At some point, however, we also evolved the capacity for culture - and from that moment, culture began evolving in its own right. This transformed us from a mere ape into an ape capable of reshaping the planet, travelling to other worlds, and understanding the vast universe of which we're but a tiny, fleeting fragment. Featuring a new foreword by Michael Shermer.

The true story of an adventurer-turned-warrior fighting poachers and traffickers to protect animals from extinction. Staging heart-pounding, espionage-style raids, Ofir Drori and his organization, The Last Great Ape (LAGA), have put countless poachers and traffickers of endangered species behind bars, and they have fought back against a Kafkaesque culture of corruption. Before Ofir arrived in Cameroon, no one had ever even tried. The Last Great Ape follows a young Ofir on fantastical adventures as he crosses remote African lands by camel, on a horse, and in dug-out canoes, while living with exotic tribes and struggling against nature at its rawest: charging elephants and hyenas, flash floods, and the need to eat river algae and snails to stay alive. The story moves from places of extreme beauty to those of the darkest horror: the war zones of Sierra Leone and Liberia. Ofir begins to work as a photojournalist in order to expose his shocking encounter with war victims and child soldiers. His experiences forge in him a resolution to become an activist and to fight for justice. The search for a cause eventually leads him to Cameroon. When Ofir discovers that no one is fighting to disprove Jane Goodall's dark prophesy that apes in the wild will be extinct in twenty years, he decides that he is the man to step in; because he knows he can make a difference, he sees it as his responsibility. And LAGA is born. The Last Great Ape is a story of the fight against extinction and the tragedy of endangered worlds, not just of animals but of people struggling to hold onto their culture. This book reveals the intense beauty and strife that exist side by side in Africa, and Ofir makes the case that activism and dedication to a cause are still relevant in a cynical modern world. This dangerous and dramatic story is one of courage and hope and, most importantly, a search for meaning.

"This may be the most charming book I’ve read all year." --The New York Times "I don’t know when I last read a book with such pure and unalloyed pleasure." –Philip Pullman, internationally bestselling author of the His Dark Materials series Winner of the Mildred L. Batchelder award, this is a captivating story about dark truths and heinous crimes as well as unexpected friendships, with detailed black-and-white illustrations throughout. Perfect for fans of Brian Selznick and mystery and detective stories. Sally Jones is not only a loyal friend, she’s an extraordinary individual. In overalls or in a maharaja’s turban, this unique gorilla moves among humans without speaking but understanding everything. She and the Chief are devoted comrades who operate a cargo boat. A job they are offered pays big bucks, but the deal ends badly, and the Chief is falsely convicted of murder. For Sally Jones this is the start of a harrowing quest for survival and to clear the Chief's name. Powerful forces are working against her, and they will do anything to protect their secrets.

APE’s thesis is powerful yet simple: filling the roles of Author, Publisher and Entrepreneur yields results that rival traditional publishing.

A breakthrough theory that tools and technology are the real drivers of human evolution Although humans are one of the great apes, along with chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans, we are remarkably different from them. Unlike our cousins who subsist on raw food, spend their days and nights outdoors, and wear a thick coat of hair, humans are entirely dependent on artificial things, such as clothing, shelter, and the use of tools, and would die in nature without them. Yet, despite our status as the weakest ape, we are the masters of this planet. Given these inherent deficits, how did humans come out on top? In this fascinating new account of our origins, leading archaeologist Timothy Taylor proposes a new way of thinking about human evolution through our relationship with objects. Drawing on the latest fossil evidence, Taylor argues that at each step of our species' development, humans made choices that caused us to assume greater control of our evolution. Our appropriation of objects allowed us to walk upright, lose our body hair, and grow significantly larger brains. As we push the frontiers of scientific technology, creating prosthetics, intelligent implants, and artificially modified genes, we continue a process that started in the prehistoric past, when we first began to extend our powers through objects. Weaving together lively discussions of major discoveries of human skeletons and artifacts with a reexamination of Darwin's theory of evolution, Taylor takes us on an exciting and challenging journey that begins to answer the fundamental question about our existence: what makes humans unique, and what does that mean for our future?

"A Better Ape explores the evolution of the moral mind from our ancestors with chimpanzees, through the origins of our genus and our species, to the development of behaviorally modern humans who underwent revolutions in agriculture, urbanization, and industrial technology. The book begins, in Part I, by explaining the biological evolution of sympathy and loyalty in great apes and trust and respect in the earliest humans. These moral emotions are the first element of the moral mind. Part II explains the gene-culture co-evolution of norms, emotions, and reasoning in Homo sapiens. Moral norms of harm, kinship, reciprocity, autonomy, and fairness are the second element of the moral mind. A social capacity for interactive moral reasoning is the third element. Part III of the book explains the cultural co-evolution of social institutions and morality. Family, religious, military, political, and economic institutions expanded small bands into large tribes and created more intense social hierarchies through new moral norms of authority and purity. Finally, Part IV explains the rational and cultural evolution of moral progress and moral regress as human societies experienced gains and losses in inclusivity and equality. Moral progress against racism, homophobia, speciesism, sexism, classism, and global injustice depends on integration of privileged and oppressed people in physical space, social roles, and democratic decision making. The central idea in the book is that all these major evolutionary transitions, from ancestral apes to modern societies, and now human survival of climate change, depend on co-evolution between morality, knowledge, and complex social structure"--