Unwitting Travelers: A History of Primate Reintroduction is an encyclopedic collection of 234 primate reintroduction programs that were conducted between the 16th century and the present. The author, Benjamin Beck, combs through more than 600 sources to document the location, dates, species, numbers of animals, methods, purposes, and outcomes of each program. His work reveals that more than 24,000 primates have been reintroduced in the wild. With only a single exception, the primates had no idea of where they were being taken or why; they were truly unwitting travelers. They struggled to adapt; many didn’t.

The protagonist of Ape is a chimpanzee mastermind who matches wits with poachers, idealistic scientists, a determined Rwandan policeman, an American college student, and a petty government official in a deadly struggle to survive. The gripping story ranges just one or two steps beyond scientific reality as it explores chimpanzee intelligence and emotion, their rights and responsibilities, and whether they can be criminals. The people and the chimpanzees face violence, rivalries, treachery, revenge, frayed loyalties, and touching friendships.

A story of hope, love, and unspeakable death in a disappearing Brazilian rainforest. A team of dogged conservationists tries to save a beautiful monkey species, the golden lion tamarin, from certain extinction by reinforcing their numbers with tamarins born in zoos. Will these immigrants learn to find enough to eat, find secure places to sleep, avoid predators, and survive attacks by wild tamarins? Will they find mates and make babies? The technique, known as reintroduction, is new, and the conservationists struggle to find the best method. Can they train the tamarins in zoos to meet the challenges of the wild? Once the monkeys are released in the forest, should the people give them food, shoo away predators, rescue them if they get lost, and treat them if they are injured? Or should they be hands-off, letting the monkeys fend for themselves and become wild as quickly as possible? Beck describes the reintroduction of the first 13 tamarins, capturing their fierce determination to survive, their loves and conflicts, their nurturant families, adorable babies, hidden language, sometimes hilarious attempts to solve the problems of adapting, and the agonizing deaths of those who don't make it. He describes the power and beauty of the rainforest, and the loves, loyalties, conflicts, and sometimes hilarious bumbling by their human caretakers. Challenging their better-known bosses, two women, a zookeeper and a Brazilian field assistant, discover the right way to reintroduce the monkeys. But a well-known Rio citizen almost destroys the program in a callous act of vanity. The story is vivid and authentic; Beck was there and has studied animal thinking and monkey and ape conservation for more than 40 years.