From the biographer of Jane Goodall comes an eccentric blend of travels and adventures based on the underlying story of two men, sometime friends and allies, who uncover through personal experience the tragedy of animal extinctions in Africa and Asia. By turns ironic, funny, and tender, it contemplates changing landscapes and a vanishing world.

Over the last fifteen years, nature historian Dale Peterson has collaborated with photographer Karl Ammann to produce three books about apes, elephants, and giraffes. For this new memoir, Peterson recounts his travels with the iconoclastic Swiss photographer through Africa and Southeast Asia, serving as his Boswell and discovering along the way magnificent splendor, unexpected humor, and tragic loss.

Dale Peterson is the coauthor, with Jane Goodall, of Visions of Caliban (a New York Times Notable Book and a Library Journal Best Book) and the editor of her two books of letters, Africa in My Blood and Beyond Innocence. His other books include The Deluge and the Ark, Chimpanzee Travels, Storyville USA, Eating Apes, and (with Richard Wrangham) Demonic Males. They have been distinguished as an Economist Best Book, a Discover Top Science Book, a Bloomsbury Review Editor’s Favorite, a Village Voice Best Book, and a finalist for the PEN New England Award and the Sir Peter Kent Conservation Book Prize in England. He resides in Massachusetts. He will speak on Friday, February 12 at 7 pm at Porter Square Books, 25 White Street in Cambridge, beginning at 7 pm, and copies of the book will be available for purchase and signing. For more information visit www.portersquarebooks.com.