Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
He'd lost his mother as a child and been physically abused by the housekeeper who raised him, and
reading Freud, he began to comprehend the depth of his trauma. After the war, he became a psychi-
atrist and married Jane Jewell, a Boston native and Wellesley graduate handpicked by the National
Security Agency straight out of college to work as a cryptanalyst. Sally's older sister was born in
1955, Sally in 1960.
Sally grew up in western North Carolina, her father having found work at Asheville's famed
Highland Hospital, where Zelda Fitzgerald died in a fire in 1948. He'd taken the job because it was
one of the few places that didn't rely on electroshock to treat schizophrenics. He preferred to speak
with patients and understand what had disturbed their minds. Sally noticed the way he looked at
people, as if really seeing them, understanding them without judging, and she wanted to have this
patience to learn how others lived. He showed the same care with her and her sister, helping them
with homework, discussing literature and philosophy. He also treated poor people in the community,
and since Asheville was in the Jim Crow South, he kept a home office that was open to everyone.
But his own health, both mental and physical, declined when he was relatively young. A chain
smoker, he developed emphysema, and in Sally's telling, I got the sense of a man who found re-
lease from perfectionism through his addictions. She described him as a Jekyll-and-Hyde alcoholic:
intent on being the best person possible, though each time he broke down and drank, he became vi-
olent, unable to remember his actions the next day. When Sally was twelve, he died in an accident,
having driven his car into a bridge abutment on the Interstate. He was sober at the time, and no one
knew if he'd fallen asleep at the wheel or crashed on purpose.
In the years that followed, she decided that she would study psychology, that it would help her
figure out her father and herself. But after she enrolled at Williams College, she became disillu-
sioned with Western psychology and interested in religion, anthropology, poetry, and art. She loved
reading Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, Derrida, and Mircea Eliade, as well as the spiritual texts of the Sufis
and Hindus.
In 1982, when she graduated and returned to Asheville, she craved a clear direction. Unem-
ployment was high, and the country's culture of materialism reflected nothing she valued. She saw
a career counselor who told her that she was suited for advertising because of the combination of
psychology, writing, and art in her background. She joined a small ad office in DC and, after three
years, went freelance, working mostly with nonprofits. Though freelancing gave her time to travel
the American Southwest, California, Mexico, and Central America, she wasn't satisfied.
In 1990, she received a freelance contract to work for the National Geographic Society. The
shelves in her family's summer home in Maine had been filled with the magazine, and growing up
she had spent days reading issues dating back to the early 1900s. She loved the idea of working
with the natural world, and later, when the National Geographic Society announced an opening for
a full-time copywriter, she applied in hopes of transitioning to the magazine and writing articles.
One of her assignments was to promote the topic
The Great Apes: Between Two Worlds
, which
contained Michael “Nick” Nichols's photos of chimpanzees, orangutans, and gorillas in both the
wild and captivity, as well as Frans Lanting's images of bonobos. Captivated, Sally read topic after
topic about great apes. She met with Jane Goodall and George Schaller, a field biologist who'd
studied gorillas, but she found Dian Fossey's story most compelling: how she'd befriended a gor-
illa named Digit, and how he'd been killed—his head, hands, and feet cut off by poachers to sell to
tourists in Nairobi. Fossey then gave up her ambitions for scientific research and devoted herself to
