My Family Album Hardcover by Frans De Waal

Product Details

• Publisher: WW Norton (2026-10-13)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 176 pages
• ISBN-13: 9781324117841
• Item Weight: 890.19 grams
• Dimensions: 21.08 x 26.42 x 1.78 cm

An extraordinary album of photographs from one of the world’s foremost primatologists, with his characteristically humorous and enlightening observations.

For decades, New York Times best-selling author and world-renowned primatologist Frans de Waal studied monkeys and apes in zoos, research parks, and field settings. He captured the relationships of primates and their natural communication with an intimate knowledge, abundantly present in this unique work: a family album of our closest living relatives.

Culled from the thousands of photographs de Waal took across a thirty-year period, My Family Album showcases the rich social life of bonobos, chimpanzees, capuchin monkeys, baboons, and macaques. From parent-child bonds to territorial conflicts and romantic entanglements, the images capture the subtle gestures, expressions, and movements that elude most nature photographers and casual observers of our primate family. De Waal’s extended captions discuss each photograph and offer descriptions that range from colorful impressions to sharp professional interpretation, resulting in an intensely moving and personal view of all that science can tell us about primate company. With a new foreword by Carl Safina, this edition is a richly evocative album for animal lovers everywhere.

About the Author

Frans de Waal (1948–2024), author of Mama’s Last Hug, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?, and Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist, was C. H. Candler Professor Emeritus at Emory University. He lived in Atlanta, Georgia.

Carl Safina is a Stony Brook University endowed professor and the recipient of a MacArthur “genius” fellowship. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Time, the Guardian, Audubon, and National Geographic. He lives in East Setauket, New York.