In this riveting portrait of George B. Schaller, the world’s leading field biologist, Miriam Horn captures the seventy years he spent living among wild animals in the world’s remotest regions, forever altering how we see—and save—the natural world

In 1959, at just twenty-six years old, the biologist George B. Schaller shrugged off warnings of mortal danger and set off for the Belgian Congo to do what his peers wouldn’t dare: conduct the first sustained field study of mountain gorillas by living alongside them. Boldly refusing arms and retinue, Schaller and his wife, Kay, established a home in the jungle and came to share the apes’ rhythms and rules. After more than two years of immersive study—a groundbreaking methodology he would spend his life honing—Schaller transformed how the world viewed gorillas; they were not murderous brutes but tender creatures, and more like humans than any twentieth-century scientist had recognized. His mission to revolutionize our perceptions of wild animals would propel him across four continents and inspire generations of scientists.

In Homesick for a World Unknown, Miriam Horn draws on thousands of pages from Schaller’s archives, globe-spanning interviews, and two journeys into the field with the legendary scientist himself, revealing the magnificent life of the man who would become the founding father of modern wildlife conservation. She examines how Schaller’s compulsion to escape into the wilderness came not only from a fearless spirit but a childhood upended by displacement. Born in Berlin in 1933 to an American socialite married to a Nazi diplomat, the young Schaller was moved from one occupied country to another before he finally immigrated with his mother to the US in 1947 as an enemy alien. It was in the woods that teenage George found a place of respite and at the University of Alaska that he found both his calling and a lifelong partner in Kay.

In the decades following his work in the Congo, Schaller went on to conduct the earliest studies of Indian tigers, Serengeti lions, Brazilian jaguars, Chinese pandas, and Tibetan brown bears, meticulously cataloging their private lives. He navigated acute danger and political unrest in pursuit of empathy for and preservation of creatures big and small. It was Schaller who first guided Jane Goodall on her chimp study in Tanzania and led Peter Matthiessen into Nepal in search of the snow leopard. His impact radiated far beyond the scientific realm: He secured protections for vast national parks and partnered with local communities to protect the homes they share with these animals. A vivid and captivating account of the adventurous life of George B. Schaller, here is the definitive portrait of the man who dared to challenge us to rethink our place in the natural world.