Book Description

Desmond Morris, author of The Naked Ape and Manwatching, is a household name. He is admired and renowned as a natural historian, a keen observer of both animal and human behaviour. This is his long-awaited autobiography. The autobiography begins with a shy young boy who, while everyone else was dancing on the streets, celebrated VE day by observing a colony of rooks. After studying the behavioural habits of the ten-spined stickleback at Oxford, Morris became Curator of Mammals at London Zoo and quickly became a familiar figure in homes all over Britain as presenter of Zootime, delighting millions of tea-time viewers with a daring attempt to pick up a deadly scorpion by its tail or a tumble off the back of an elephant, An-An. As Curator of Mammals at the zoo, life was as bizarre behind the cameras as in front of them, not least when a whale turned up in the Thames at Kew or when a pair of ferocious bears escaped and caused havoc with a lavatory. In 1967, with the publication of the landmark book The Naked Ape, Morris turned his attention to humans. Since then he has continued his work on human and animal species, written many other successful books and has presented a number of television series. Desmond Morris's travels have taken him to some sixty countries, from the cities of North America to the islands off the Mediterranean, Europe, the Pacific and Africa. This book tells the story of many of these adventures, in fascinating and often hilarious detail.