Through Eugene Dubois’ eyes: Stills of a turbulent life

Eugene Dubois, the man who found the missing link between apes and humans, intended to write a book about his finds in Indonesia. He never finished it. In this current volume the outlines of Dubois’ book are reconstructed. Recently discovered correspondence with his intended publisher shed new light on the troublesome character of Dubois and his inability to communicate with the scientific establishment.

This volume also discloses the vast amount of photographic material that is part of the Dubois Collection at Naturalis, the National Museum of Natural History in Leiden, the Netherlands. As Pat Shipman summarizes it in her preface: […] what this book offers, it is more: more images, more letters, more details, more insight into the workings of a brilliant but unquestionably difficult man of science. We shall not see Dubois’ like again so it is doubly fortunate that Albers and de Vos have uncovered so much about his life.