Gorilla Tactics: How to Save a Species

Cummings, the former director of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund U.K., debuts with a boastful memoir about how his superior salesmanship has helped raise money for gorilla conservation. In his early 20s, Cummings was working as a bartender in London when a bar patron involved with a children’s charity helped him land a fundraising job. Discovering he had a knack for the work, Cummings left the charity after a year to become the executive director of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund U.K., which bankrolls anti-poaching patrols and studies of Rwanda’s endangered mountain gorillas. Cummings indulges in frequent name-dropping, as when he goes on a lengthy tangent about a formative experience meeting Arthur C. Clarke as a child while discussing how the sci-fi author later helped the Fund convince NASA to photograph the gorillas’ habitat from space. The granular accounts of Cummings’s fundraising efforts are tedious and self-congratulatory (“I made it rain grants”), and readers will wish he spent more time on his reverent recollections of photographing and studying gorillas in the wild. Additionally, Cummings has an unfortunate penchant for distasteful phrasing (he refers to the Rwandan genocide as “Star Wars in Africa”). This disappoints. (Mar.)