Missing Links: The African and American Worlds of R. L. Garner opens with a description of a dinner attended by US President William Howard Taft. It is here that the reader first meets Richard Lynch Garner, “An aging and portly Virginian” whose “origins in a small railroad town in southwestern Virginia and his poor finances hardly corresponded with the genteel company. Yet Garner had something that allowed him to enter such an august gathering despite only having a high school education. He had a chimpanzee” (2). Writing such as this is sure to capture the attention of scholars and students alike interested in animal histories, environmental history, the history of science, Atlantic history and/or American cultural history. Indeed, as Rich reminds us, Garner is a character who transcends any such neat, artificial, disciplinary boundaries, instead weaving “along Atlantic circuits of trade and knowledge, defying the traditional borders that still too often divide historians of the United States, Europe, and Africa” (3).

At its heart, Missing Links is about an amateur and outsider who, despite lacking all the usual requirements for entering the world of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century science, created a popular reputation for himself as an expert in primate communication. Garner capitalized on America's fascination with primates and evolution by feeding zoos' and museums' appetites for primate specimens and by writing countless articles about his adventures collecting and “talking with” primates.

Garner's ability to negotiate along the fringes in society, both in the United States and in Africa, made him an unusual character and something of a celebrity with the American public. If Garner was embraced in popular quarters, he was shunned by the scientific elite for apparent flaws in his research and misrepresentations concerning his time spent in the jungle. The phonograph might have provided a useful and new methodology for the study of primates, but his encounters in Gabon highlight the complexity of conducting science in a colonial context, as his political negotiations with the Nkomi and colonial authority attest.

In addition to exploring the place of apes in the imaginations of Americans in the early twentieth century, Jeremy Rich teases out the complex ways colonialism and race were interwoven with primate collecting. Rather than focus solely on Garner's negative depiction of Africans, Rich uses unpublished records to highlight his dynamic views on colonialism and his relationship with southern Gabonese communities, members of which provided him with a range of expertise regarding finding, trading in and understanding primates, in addition to logistical support in the form of cooks, porters and carpenters.

Rich also draws many interesting parallels between the Appalachian region and southern Gabon, and indeed between Garner himself and many Gabonese communities. It is also apparent that the more influential members of these communities found ways to benefit from the colonizing process (42–43). By focussing on Garner's formative experiences in both locations, readers are able to see the complex racial dynamics he encountered on both sides of the Atlantic and how he interpreted them through a scientific lens (109–11).

The focus in Missing Links on Garner's life also intersects nicely with masculinity studies. In Rich's own words, Garner's “life sheds light on eccentric examples of southern manhood, a rare topic given that most studies of masculinity in the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era focus on the northern elite and middle-class men” (68). Garner is proud, self-made and at least partially scientifically successful, while also being insecure and plagued by challenging social relationships of the kind that often accompany long times spent abroad. These private challenges formed an intriguing contrast to Garner's public persona.

In sum, Missing Links showcases what can happen when thorough transdisciplinary research intersects with vivid description: a book that serves as a superb example of serious scholarship combined with excellent narration. Not only does Rich weave a history of many localities, but he strives to connect it to the present, contextualizing this work for an audience that may be unfamiliar with this part of West Africa or the Appalachians, and the many relationships that exist between the history of primatology and colonial politics. These characteristics ensure that Missing Links would work wonderfully as a text in a host of classes including ones focussed on historical geography, the human–animal boundary, or American or African history, especially if such courses had an environmental focus.