The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses animal abuse, death by suicide, and substance abuse.

In fall 2020, Jane and Doug are finally able to meet again, but on Zoom. Doug recently lost two friends: One died by suicide after losing his job and another died by substance abuse. Jane carries the laptop around her home in Bournemouth, showing him her keepsakes and photos of important people and animals in her life. She shows him a series of stuffed animals she uses in her public education lectures.

Her most prized possessions that symbolize “hope” include a bell made from a land mine in Mozambique; a piece of fabric used by someone who lost a leg in a landmine explosion; concrete from the Berlin wall; limestone from the quarry Nelson Mandela did forced labor in; two feathers sent to her by Don Merton from the hatchlings of the black robin “Blue”; a 26-inch feather from the California condor.

Doug wonders what it is about Jane that enables her to be a “beacon of hope.” Jane credits her family, growing up in World War II, and witnessing the fall of the Nazi regime as early factors in her growth. She was often sick as a child but felt better when in nature. At Cambridge, almost all the professors she encountered disbelieved her observations about chimps, but she didn’t argue and just presented them with the evidence. 

In 1986, she decided to fight to defend chimps who were being used in medical research. She visited medical labs and had small victories. Many groups helped her, and finally labs stopped using chimps for testing.

Challenges in Africa

In the mid-1980s, Jane saw images from “across Africa of forests destroyed, horror stories of chimps shot for bushmeat and infants snatched from their dead mothers to sell, and evidence of a drastic decline in numbers of chimpanzees wherever they were being studied” (197). She didn’t know how to help but felt no choice but to try.

Jane happened to have lunch with George H. W. Bush’s secretary of state, who contacted ambassadors in the countries she planned to visit. From there, she contacted local ministers of environment for help in freeing infant chimps captured as pets. For issues that affected wild chimps, she knew she had to help local communities first.

From Shy Young Woman to Global Public Speaker

Jane talks about how she feared public speaking but found out she had a gift for communicating and connecting with people. She recalls an early lecture she gave and was very nervous about. Afterward, someone asked for the transcript and was shocked that Jane had spoken for an hour off six bullet points. Jane believes she should use her “gifts” for a reason.

“Let’s Just Say It Was A Mission”

Doug asks Jane if she felt doubt even after being called to her “mission.” One instance was when she was asked to speak at a UN climate change conference; she doubted her abilities because she wasn’t a climate scientist.

Jane feels lucky to have “amazing people” supporting her. She takes strength from her grandmother’s favorite Bible verse. When she is exhausted, she opens her mind to an “outside force” and a “wisdom greater than my own” (205) that helps her. Jane leaves the conversation to feed the robins outside her window and Doug looks up an Albert Einstein quote about a “superior intelligence” (206) in the universe. When Jane returns, Doug asks if she thinks she’s guided by this intelligence or by coincidence.

Was It Coincidence?

Jane doesn’t believe in coincidence, but in “opportunities.” She recalls walking with her mother in World War II. Her mother had them walk home on a circuitous route. As they were walking, they saw a German plane drop two bombs on the area they would have walked through had they taken their usual route. Jane thinks her mother had a “sixth sense” for danger; this ability for “premonition” was inherited by Jane’s son, Grub.

Jane is always on the lookout for these “opportunities” that some might call coincidence. Jane wants to find meaning in them. Doug asks how she reconciles her “spiritual orientation” with her “scientific mind.”

Spiritual Evolution

Jane says humans are on a “road of moral evolution” that some parallel with a “road to spiritual evolution” (211). Moral evolution is understanding how to treat others and the world while spiritual evolution is about finding our place in the world and asking why we are here. She thinks we can find answers to these questions from the world around us. 

Jane has seen chimps admire the stars or world around them and wonders if this “sense of wonder” is a “precursor to the kind of spirituality that we are talking about” (212). This observation draws Jane back to her earlier observations on the importance of “spoken language”: She wonders where chimps might be at, evolutionarily, were they able to communicate this wonder to one another verbally.

Doug presses Jane to say more about her personal beliefs. She says she never wants to “try to persuade anyone to believe” in the “Intelligence” she sees in the universe (214). She knows many ethical people working to save the environment and its human and non-human citizens who are not religious or spiritual.

Jane is interested in scientists like Einstein and Francis Collins who see their work as complementary to spirituality. Jane thinks that for many people, religion is their “only hope.” While Jane was raised Christian, her mother emphasized how it “didn’t really matter what name was used” for the spiritual force in the universe (215). Jane doesn’t believe in a heaven with “angels playing harps,” but thinks we “shall see again those we have loved” after we pass (215).

Jane’s Next Great Adventure

In a recent lecture, someone asked Jane about her “next great adventure.” When Jane answered “dying,” the crowd adopted a “deathly hush” (215). After Jane explained her perspective, people approached her to thank her for changing their outlook on death.

Doug thinks about his father’s recent death and asks if people are more scared of illness than death; Jane affirms this and differentiates “illness or dementia or being bedridden and utterly dependent on others” from “death itself” (216). Jane doesn’t know if she believes in reincarnation but thinks that it would be “awfully unfair” to live one human lifetime amid the vastness of eternity.

Jane and Doug discuss several stories about near-death experiences that suggest “that consciousness itself seemed not to be limited to our brains” (218). Jane discusses an experience she had after her late husband Derek died. She had a dream or vision in which he spoke to her. Whenever she tried to write it down afterward, a “great roaring” developed in her head, until she could no longer recall exactly what he said. Jane talked to another woman who had an identical experience and thought the dead were on a different “plane” that sleep could brush up against.

Doug asks why Jane thinks so many people say she gives them hope. She doesn’t know but wishes she did. She guesses that people sense her sincerity. Before she and Doug hang up their Zoom call, she shows him “Beech,” her childhood beech tree that she mentioned in Chapter 3. When Doug hangs up, he contemplates how Jane’s legacy would spark an “indomitable human spirit in all of us” that “would finish what she could not” (223).