Missing Links

Missing Links is a well-organized and informative examination, and it deserves a wide audience among cultural, transitional, and colonial historians, as well as among scholars in the field of animal studies and the history of science.

--Andrea Patterson "Journal of Southern History"

A stunning story about Richard Lynch Garner and the gorillas he simultaneously befriended, loved, displayed, and exploited. Rich's book is an exciting and significant contribution to scholarship at the intersection of African studies, the history of science, and the interdisciplinary field of animal studies.

--Georgina Montgomery "Michigan State University"

Jeremy Rich unfolds the many layers of this deeply flawed and forgotten Progressive Era figure in Missing Links, a thoroughly entertaining, well-researched, content-rich book. It is an ambitious work.

--Jeremy M. DeSilva "International Journal of African Historical Studies"

When he died in 1920, the Virginia-born Richard Garner was famous for his evolution-inspired studies of African apes, monkeys, and peoples. In this important and impressive book, Jeremy Rich uses Garner's story to throw new light on his times--and on ours. The individual chapters are fascinating, and collectively they make a compelling case for Garner as an instructive figure for cultural historians.

--Gregory Radick "author of The Simian Tongue: The Long Debate about Animal Language"

Missing Links uses the life of R.L. Garner to consider the commercial networks that brough the first apes to America during the Progressive Era, a time when ideas about African wildlife, race and evolution were being posited and solidified. . . .[Garner's] studies and his efforts to bring some of the first live primates to America offers a spowerful account that shouldn't be limited to biography sections, but promoted for science and nature history collections as well.

--Midwest Book Review