Based on the subtitle Orangutans and the Secret Life of a Vanishing Species I was expecting to be reading a book about the secret lives of Orangutans. But in imy view the author spent more time writing about the secret lives of the various Orangutan researches he interviewed than on the Orangutans. Granted, these researches did important work and deserve the recognition but I really felt too much time was spent on the inner lives of the researchers. ( )

I wish GoodReads had an "abandoned" button. Or in this case, a "hurled into the corner at speed for being entirely unreadable" button.

I found the author's style so annoying, clunky and fragmented that I gave up very early on. There may indeed be something of worth here, but I haven't the fortitude to wade through the clanking prose to find it. ( )

Like many others before me, I was disappointed with this book. I was hoping, as an animal fanatic, to be able to learn more about a species that I have not deeply looked into than I did. I normally don't read nonfiction, however, so my review may not "count" as much as others'.

I already knew about several of the people who were mentioned quite a bit in the book from school, and while I extended my knowledge of them by a bit, I really didn't learn much new about orangutans. I see that this book has failed somewhat in its purpose, educating the reader about the orangutans, but not completely. There was interesting material.

Sad to say, I don't think that I will be picking this up again to read. ( )

As others have said, orangutans are essentially tangential to the story Thompson is telling. Information about the apes is scattered about as asides or as ways to advance the real story being told. It is also unfortunate that the author's focus is repetitive. The book breaks down into biographies of two categories of people: those that go to the jungle and have it ruin relationships and those that can't relate to people and build relationships with orangutans.

Of course the world of orangutan researches very small and centers around the Jane Goodall/Dian Fossey of this great ape, Birute Galdikas. All of the other researchers cross paths with Galdikas and Galdikas's own story is old news by the time Thompson gets around to it near the end of the book. ( )

Disappointingly, this is not a book about orangutans, but a book about the people who study orangutans. The author, although passionate about his subject, is not a scientist or even a particularly good observer of apes on his travels. Instead, he travels the world to talk to the people who do or have in the past worked with apes, either in captivity or in the wild. The result is third person accounts of interactions with orangs or more broadly with the jungle itself. It's easy to see that the author admires these "do-ers", but does little himself, other than recount biographies and slip in little diatribes about human "savages" and the decline of the world as we know it. In addition, I felt that the author could have benefitted from more vigorous editing and a professional photographer. ( )