I cannot claim to be dispassionate or unbiased about Stella Brewer's lovely book The Forest Dwellers. I played a part, albeit a small one, in the tale it has to tell. It is the story of Stella Brewer’s life from the age of seventeen until her middle twenties; of the lives of several chimpanzees from early childhood until young adulthood; of one orphan chimpanzee that Stella found in pitiful circumstances in the Banjul market in the Gambia and resolved to save, and of how it comes to be not so much life itself that must be saved but the chance for the chimpanzees to live their lives to the full in the wild. Several of the animals die or get lost in the course of the book, but there is no feeling of failure in this story of a very brave and, in the end, successful attempt to do something useful in man's relations with this close relative. It is gently written, but the story is full of bite, with plenty of amusing incident.