Word: ardrey
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Mopping up after the invaders of animal privacy have come the generalists. They include Playwright Robert Ardrey, whose The Territorial Imperative was rashly naive, and Zoologist Desmond Morris, whose The Naked Ape was at least brashly amusing. Now publishers are packaging curiosities and precursors. Despite considerable charm and insight, The Soul of the Ape is one such...
Self-Educated Naturalist. Marais's reputation is likely to suffer from the publication. After 54 pages of overheated, condescending preface, Robert Ardrey bumps to a comic conclusion: "Had Marais been enabled to finish his manuscript, polish the rough parts, rethink a few conclusions, add further ideas that had come to him, then beyond all question he would have left us more than we shall find in the following pages." Too true. There is a provocative chapter on the sex life of baboons, whose customs find some resonances in human behavior. Baboons also become addicted to intoxicants, it appears...
...Association of the Bar of the City of New York and financed by $75,000 worth of Carnegie Corporation grants, Privacy and Freedom took four years to write. It involved Westin in hundreds of interviews, thousands of hours of research through newspapers, court records and books, ranging from Robert Ardrey's The Territorial Imperative to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Just as thoroughly, Westin has compiled a catalogue of electronic bugging devices, wiretaps and mechanical spies that will surprise even those who think they are up on the subject. Items currently available: TV cameras small enough...
Search for First Causes. Ardrey is undeniably an exciting writer, with a very excitable mind. He has the playwright's flair for the dramatic, for the hyperbole that embroiders truth. That does not mean that his books should be swallowed whole. He will never win his spurs in the scientific community, which stands aghast at his unscientific methodology. The true scientist strives to make a theory stick by marshaling all the conceivable evidence against it. Ardrey vaults to a theory over the obstacles of rebutting fact...
Still, there is plenty to think about in The Territorial Imperative, for the search for first causes is an exhilarating adventure. Ardrey can serve as a valuable if treacherous bridge for the stimulated reader who wants to gain more reliable anthropological ground. And if serious anthropologists persist in complaining that Ardrey is trespassing on their territory, let them consider the wolf...