A Forest in the Clouds

January 1, 2018
"Who was this woman who could leave behind so many murder suspects?" So asks one-time apprentice Fowler of Dian Fossey, the renowned and supremely difficult primatologist.After a year of working with Fossey, who was murdered in her forest hut in Rwanda in 1985, the author recounts that he returned to the U.S. a little shell-shocked though missing the forest preserve where he worked with her in her study of wild gorilla populations. To his new colleagues at a stateside zoo, he said only, "Dian was kind of difficult to work with." This book is a long--indeed, somewhat too long--commentary that puts a point on that observation. Fossey felt embattled by challenges to the fiefdom she had created in the rainforest; poachers were a constant menace to the gorillas that lived there, but it did not help that she seems to have suspected just about every African person she encountered. Her paranoia mounted, as did her fear of black magic, "the stuff of African lore in which someone might put a curse on you." It did not help, either, that she took to drinking heavily and was abrasive and confrontational even when sober. Readers take the point of Fossey's deep unpleasantness early on, so Fowler's repeated assessments get a little tiresome as the catalog builds. More interesting are his notes on fieldwork among the gorillas of the Karisoke Research Center, whose personalities he found less challenging and frightful than his employer's. One highlight involves separating himself from a baby gorilla that had become too attached to him and that reacts with a gigantic scream: "She was having a tantrum...a meltdown!" Fowler even ventures a little sleuthing as to the identity of Fossey's killer, whom he suggests was someone trusted enough to have come inside her dwelling unsuspected.A little goes a long way here. Of interest, though, to students of field science as well as devotees of Gorillas in the Mist.

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February 15, 2018

Researcher Fowler's memoir covers the year he spent as an undergraduate at Karisoke Research Center, Rwanda, working for famed mountain gorilla behaviorist Dian Fossey. While at first thrilled to be chosen as one of three students to work with Fossey, the author quickly learns the scientist can be unwelcoming and temperamental, offering limited direction to her students and suffering from paranoia. Fowler perseveres despite the challenges, and his first job is caring for a young gorilla, recovered from poachers, that Fossey hopes to return to the wild--their first attempt is a harrowing experience for all. Fowler describes in detail his life and work in the beautiful Virunga Mountains and shares his experiences studying gorillas at Karisoke. VERDICT Vividly descriptive of the landscape, plants, and animals Fowler encounters, this fascinating memoir will appeal to those interested in Dian Fossey, gorilla conservation, and the life of a research scientist.--Sue O'Brien, Downers Grove, IL

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 19, 2018
Fowler’s memoir of his year spent as a student assistant at the Karisoke Research Center in Rwanda conveys delight in and appreciation for gorilla-human relationships. But it is primarily an unflattering profile of camp founder and primate behaviorist Dr. Dian Fossey, best known for her book Gorillas in the Mist, who was murdered at the facility in 1985. Fowler’s descriptions of his interactions with the “miserable” Fossey, whom he calls “good at humiliation and demoralization,” show her as mercurial, foul-mouthed, irritable, often drunk, paranoid, controlling, vehemently possessive of “her” mountain gorillas, and extreme in her response to both research competitors and poachers. Nevertheless, the mood is lightened by descriptions of Fowler’s peers building community by working together in the field, mocking their boss, and secretly indulging in communal dinners despite Dian’s ban on them. Fowler shows incredible warmth in his stories about becoming babysitter and big brother to a rescued baby gorilla and his description of introducing himself to a gorilla group by allowing them to walk all over him, making the emotional whiplash caused by reporting in at the end of the day seem particularly dramatic. Though it’s unclear whether Fowler’s behind-the-scenes report is intended more to take down a celebrity or to add to her dramatic mythology, in the end he has definitely done both.