The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times

Whisky and Swahili Bean Sauce

Doug’s first-person narration begins as he arrives in Tanzania to meet Jane and ponders what hope means. Jane calls him and invites him to dinner. He brings her favorite whisky as a gift and Jane’s daughter-in-law serves Swahili bean sauce and rice. Doug converses with Jane and her visiting grandkids, some of whom also work in conservation.

Doug is a hope skeptic. He thinks hope ignores “the grim reality of life” (7). He wants to figure out the difference between hope and optimism, whether Jane ever lost hope, and how people can maintain hope.

Is Hope Real?

The next day, the pair meet to discuss hope. Jane defines hope as “what we desire to happen” (8) and are willing to work to achieve. Hope can survive even where people cannot take action, like in prisons. Jane thinks even animals have hopes.

She differentiates hope from the religious concept of faith, where people “believe these things are true” (10). She thinks hope is “more humble” than faith. Hope isn’t a “survival skill,” but a “survival trait” (10-11).

Have You Ever Lost Hope?

Jane considers herself a naturalist who looks for “wonders of nature,” not a scientist who looks for “facts” (11). Doug asks about Jane’s early experiences. In 1957, planes didn’t fly to Africa so she took a boat to Mombasa, Kenya. She didn’t have money to attend university, but had a recreational passion for African mammals. She was invited by a friend to meet a famous paleoanthropologist called Dr. Louis Leakey and to help him on an archaeological dig in Tanzania. It was an unusual career for any European person, let alone a young woman.

Later that year, Leakey was looking for someone to study chimpanzee behavior in a remote area near Lake Tanganyika. The British government was “horrified at the thought of a young white woman going off into the bush” (15) but they agreed on the condition that she take a “European” companion. Leakey and Jane recruited Jane’s mother.

Catching “rare glimpses” (16) of chimps over the next few months made her despair. She believed she could gain their trust in time, but only had so much funding. Leakey believed in her and noted her natural instinct for interaction with animals. When she’d despair over her fruitless observations, Leakey would encourage her.

She slowly gained the chimp’s trust, giving them names. She observed David Greybeard, the first chimp to trust her, using grass stems as tools for foraging. After Jane reported this, National Geographic took charge of her funding and provided documentary resources, including a cameraman named Hugo van Lawick, whom Jane would later marry.

Jane always had hope she’d gain the chimps’ trust in those years. When she attended a conference of scientists studying chimps, she found that chimp numbers were declining because of poaching, trading, and ecosystem destruction. When she went to study these sites, she saw the humans living near them also suffered from poverty, environmental racism, lack of health resources, and more.

Doug asks Jane if she ever lost hope. She says she might have when her second husband died. Her family, pets, and the forest at Gombe eventually helped her out of her grief. When he asks if she ever feels hopeless about the future of humanity, she says no, because no one will ever know what the future will bring.

Can Science Explain Hope?

When he and Jane agreed to write the book, Doug began research into “hope studies,” learning that hope is different from wishing or fantasizing because it sparks action. Jane differentiates it from optimism. Since hope involves action, someone’s action can inspire others’ hope and subsequent action, creating collective action. Doug references studies on how hope has a quantifiable effect on productivity and success, while Jane thinks people will be more moved by stories; they agree to add a “Further Reading” section to the book to include the studies. 

Jane thinks that interpersonal hope—like a parent’s hope that their child will have a good life—can affect their hope for the world; for instance, they hope the environment and air quality will be satisfactory to allow for their child to thrive in the future. Their discussion ends when Jane is called away by a National Geographic film crew.

How Do We Have Hope in Trying Times?

The next morning they reconvene. Jane fell earlier and has a cut on her knee, which prompts her to tell a story about one of her worst injuries. Twelve years ago, she was pursuing a chimp up a hundred-pound rock, which loosened beneath her weight. Something pushed her to the side as she and the rock fell, ensuring her safety as the rock fell down a hundred-foot cliff. She got a dislocated shoulder and broken cheekbone.

Doug is impressed by Jane’s toughness and resilience. He tells a story of Dr. Edith Eger, who was sent to Auschwitz at age 16 and had people ask her how she maintained hope in a death camp. She differentiated between hope and idealism. Hope “does not deny the evil but is a response to it” (35), thus you can maintain hope in terrible situations.

Doug looks forward to discussing Jane’s four reasons for hope, but that night, he gets a call that his father was rushed to the hospital and flies back to New York.