Could an adorable chimpanzee raised from infancy by a human family bridge the gap between species-and change the way we think about the boundaries ...
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Sep 02, 2008
Susan
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Don't bother with this book, I was very disappointed in what I read. From the very beginning she mixes up what is fact and what is not, for example when talking about the genetic similarities between chimps and humans, she states "In 2006 Harvard geneticist David Reich discovered evidence that we share a common ancestor, the product of sexual relations between humans and chimpanzees."(pg. 9) This is speculation, but she is stating it as fact. It is also total crap. There has never be
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Mar 24, 2008
Amy
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Wow...whether you are a BF Skinner or Noam Chompsky fan, an animal acitivist or advocate, are interested in language aquisition or linguistics, this book is fascinating. Though I am well aware of sentient animals being used in both behavioral and boimedical research, this book really was a wake up call for me. I have read many nonfiction accounts of amazing animals...animals who clearly have the ability to think and feel, Nim illustrates the humanness of primates poignantly. I would highly re
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Mar 20, 2009
Lisa
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We live in a throw-away society, even when it comes to animals, as evidenced by the pets found in shelters. And Nim, a chimpanzee who lived with humans for the first few years of his life, was also a victim of this mentality.
Nim was taken from his mother within weeks of birth and went to live with a human family and taught American Sign Language. Researchers wanted to disprove Noam Chompsky's theory that language is inherent only in humans. Some studies were successful, others wer More...
Nim was taken from his mother within weeks of birth and went to live with a human family and taught American Sign Language. Researchers wanted to disprove Noam Chompsky's theory that language is inherent only in humans. Some studies were successful, others wer More...
Dec 08, 2008
Christina Stind
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This is the story of Nim Chimpsky, a young chimp chosen to be part of a language experiment. The idea of the experiment was to prove Noam Chompsky wrong - Chompsky thought that language is inherent in human beings and for this reason can't be taught, that language is exlusive to humans. Project Nim is trying to prove that you can teach a chimp to use sign language and that the chimp is then able to communicate his thoughts and feelings.
To make the chimp's life as close to human as po More...
To make the chimp's life as close to human as po More...
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Jul 28, 2011
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May 28, 2009
Anna
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7. 1/31/2009: Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human, by Elizabeth Hess.
This was a strange and sad book. Strictly biographical and mostly without commentary, Hess details the data of Chimpsky's life: born in captivity in Oklahoma, raised in a series of foster homes and taught ASL by his foster mothers while part of a language study at Columbia University, returned to Oklahoma, and eventually placed in a sanctuary in Texas where he lived the rest of his days, Nim was a unique and More...
This was a strange and sad book. Strictly biographical and mostly without commentary, Hess details the data of Chimpsky's life: born in captivity in Oklahoma, raised in a series of foster homes and taught ASL by his foster mothers while part of a language study at Columbia University, returned to Oklahoma, and eventually placed in a sanctuary in Texas where he lived the rest of his days, Nim was a unique and More...
Jan 29, 2009
This book was listed as a reference in Captivity, a novel I enjoyed reading. This book was a non-fiction account of the chimp Nim, who was raised in a human family for the first few years of his life. Research project was to see if chimps could learn sign language when reared in human family. The sad part is what happens to the chimps when they grow so big the human family can't cope with them anymore, or when the human family grows tired of having a chimp around. From a life among humans to a c
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Dec 29, 2008
Tatiana
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This book was revealing concerning the use of chimpanzees in research, particularly research into language acquisition and communication. The book is a "biography" of Nim Chimpsky, a chimp raised as human, and taught ASL, in order to challenge Chomskian thinking that claims human use of language is in some sense unique. The scientists involved with Nim Chimpsky believed that chimps could be taught to use language as humans do... What one learns in the end is a lot about this particular
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Apr 15, 2009
Jeffrey
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I really wanted to like this book more than I did. Nim's story is fascinating, but the author focused too much on the people in Nim's life, particularly in his later years. It seems like he spent the last 20 years of his life in a cage, and I guess there isn't much of a story in that. Plus, he kinda sounded like a little bastard, and I had a hard time understanding why people were so emotionally affected by him. HOWEVER, the book does answer some interesting questions about chimpanzees who are u
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Nov 03, 2011
Erin
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The story of Nim Chimpsky is pretty heart breaking. He is shuffled from place to place as if he were nothing more than a suitcase, but he is acquiring language and attachments all along the way. It is bad enough to place captive-bred, non-language proficient chimps into many of the places where Nim lived, but researchers specifically fostered relationships and communication in Nim, only to take them away when funding or interest dried up. The transitory nature of his use as a research animal se
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Oct 03, 2011
Tara
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What began as an intellectual feud of sorts between Professor Herbert Terrace and Noam Chomsky left in its wake a good many victims, simian and human. Chomsky's theory revolves around a universal grammar inherent in the huma brain and therefore exclusive to humans. Terrace's mentor at Harvard, B.F. Skinner, believed language could be learned through behaviorism. Thus begins the story which ultimately led to chimpanzees being taken from their mothers within days and sent to various families in
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Jun 26, 2008
Christine
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I love this book. It provides a window into animal research, animal researchers and the experiences of the animals involved. Nim Chimpsky follows the life of a remarkable chimp who is placed into a project designed to refute Noam Chomsky's assertion that language is an exclusively human trait.
Nim is placed in a human home and raised as a human, until Nim proves to be too much to handle. Nim is taken away from the only family he knows and subsequently lives with two additional 'r More...
Nim is placed in a human home and raised as a human, until Nim proves to be too much to handle. Nim is taken away from the only family he knows and subsequently lives with two additional 'r More...
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Jun 12, 2008
Fran
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Elizabeth Hess's biography of signing chimp Nim Chimpsky is no doubt the best piece of non-fiction I have read in years. If Dickens had written in the 1980's instead of the latter half of the 1800's, he might have created a fictional Nim Chimpsky with as tortured and erratic a life as poor Nim's real one. With a cast of characters, both human and animal, as disparate as the teen-ager who would later become Janice on "Friends", to animal advocate Cleveland Amory, to other signing chimp
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Jun 21, 2008
Jenny
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Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human is a discomforting and absorbing biography of a research animal. In 1973, Columbia University psychologist Dr. Herbert Terrance set out to prove the renowned MIT linguistics professor Noam Chompsky wrong about language acquisition. Chomsky asserts that language, as defined by the innate ability for one to understand grammatical structure and to produce creatively new sentence structures, is an exclusively human trait. Terrance, on the other hand, bel
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May 28, 2008
Karen
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The amazing backstory of Nim (named for Noam Chomsky, MIT linguist who challenged the behaviorist theory of language), the famous chimp used to study the acquisition of language. As opposed to other famous chimps, who acquired sign language capabilities while caged, Nim was raised from the age of ten days as a human, first living with a family in a NYC brownstone and then, as he became harder to handle, in a Riverdale mansion associated with Columbia University. The basic thrust of the research
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May 22, 2008
John
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May 12, 2008
Gwen
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Well, hell. I assume it won't come as much of a surprise to you that a book about a chimp raised by humans might turn out to be really depressing.
I kept thinking of the case of Genie, the "wild child" found living in an attic, devoid of all socialization, in the 1970s. A group of researchers took her in and intended to study her acquisition of language and whether a child who had no early socialization could learn to speak. They obviously cared for her, but at the same time More...
I kept thinking of the case of Genie, the "wild child" found living in an attic, devoid of all socialization, in the 1970s. A group of researchers took her in and intended to study her acquisition of language and whether a child who had no early socialization could learn to speak. They obviously cared for her, but at the same time More...
May 28, 2008
Beth
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I read the majority of this book, but I could not finish it. My lack of commitment has nothing to do with the author's prose. She writes well, and she goes into extraordinary background detail about the subject matter.
I'm queasy about the subject of vivisection to begin with. This book outraged me on the perversity employed by scientists when deciding what to do with unwanted language acquisition chimpanzees.
Many of these chimps had been raised with humans in their homes More...
I'm queasy about the subject of vivisection to begin with. This book outraged me on the perversity employed by scientists when deciding what to do with unwanted language acquisition chimpanzees.
Many of these chimps had been raised with humans in their homes More...
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Mar 04, 2008
Kevin
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Feb 15, 2009
Bernadette
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This opened my eyes to animal research and how far we've come in a relatively short period. I would be interested to know what the current state of primate research is, though I am afraid to find out. Somewhat confusing to read, as there are a lot of names, but not many reminders as to who people are. Wish the book at been footnoted so that I could have known to be looking at all the extras in the back, which I only thought to look up about halfway through.
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Mar 28, 2009
Lynn
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Most moral tales of our time have been about humanity's refusal to accept The Other. This is a story about how the opposite impulse -- the refusal to recognize that The Other is deeply different than we are -- can lead to a vain and sentimental kind of evil. Finely detailed, well-told, and consistently discomfiting, the story is a must-read for those interested in what it means to belong to our particular species in our strange times.
Mar 23, 2009
Zach
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What's here about Nim is a fascinating story of animal psychology and the relatively small differences that separate us from the chimpanzee. Unfortunately, the book is roughly 1/4 Nim, 1/3 people who knew Nim, 1/3 animal rights activism you've heard variants of before, and the rest shoddily researched scientific meandering. All I could think while reading that 3/4 of the book (scattered throughout) is "Show me the monkey!"
Mar 14, 2009
Brigid
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OMG! this book is so sweet and funny! two funny parts, were when one time Nim was outside with one of his caretakers, and all of the sudden a thunderstorm began, and when Nim heard the thunder, he jumped into his caretakers shirt, just poking his eyes out the top. tee hee. another time, he was out in his fenced front yard, "helping" a different caretaker prune the roses, and when the caretaker realized he was sneaking eating roses, she turned right around, and sternly said, "stop
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Sep 16, 2009
Jill
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I have no idea what possessed me to buy this book, but whatever it was, I'm thankful for it. What a fantastic read! I don't usually indulge in biographies (I'm more of a "memoir" kind of girl), but this one was genuinely interesting and, at times, heartbreaking. I often sympathized more with Nim than with the people involved in his research project. In fact, most of them disgusted me. Nim, however, as well as the other chimps that Hess describes, both charmed and amazed me.
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Oct 03, 2011
This review was written by Molly Tamarkin and posted by Lizzy Mottern
This fascinating piece of nonfiction documents the life of a captive chimpanzee from his birth in 1973 to his death in 2000. The chimp’s name, Nim Chimpsky, alludes to the role he would play in scientific research: to dispute linguist Noam Chompsky’s theory that only humans were “wired” for language. From his childhood spent as “one of the family” in a Manhattan brownstone to his death on an animal reserve, Hess doc More...
This fascinating piece of nonfiction documents the life of a captive chimpanzee from his birth in 1973 to his death in 2000. The chimp’s name, Nim Chimpsky, alludes to the role he would play in scientific research: to dispute linguist Noam Chompsky’s theory that only humans were “wired” for language. From his childhood spent as “one of the family” in a Manhattan brownstone to his death on an animal reserve, Hess doc More...
Jun 08, 2011
Sarah
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Back in the 1970s, Dr. Herbert Terrace decided to study human language by having an infant chimpanzee raised in a human family using ASL. This book traces the life of that chimp, Nim, as he struggled through a morass of shifting scientific protocol and human handlers. The treatment is far from objective, particularly in its fierce repudiation Terrace and his methods and findings. On the other hand, it would be inhuman to remain unmoved by the plight of Nim and his fellow research animals in t
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May 18, 2009
ba
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If we can forgive chimps raised in human households for shitting their pants and occasionally biting those who startle them, then surely we must also forgive the misguided humans who designed, participated in, and botched the experiment that was the life of Nim Chimpski. Or maybe not, but it makes for a much less depressing read of this excellently-researched book.
Apr 03, 2011
Anne-Marie
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This book wasn't as interesting as I thought it would be. It's about a real experiment where they raised a chimpanzee just like a human - but then afterward they put him in a zoo. So he didn't really fit in with the humans or the other chimpanzees, which was sad. He was kind of lonely. It was still a good book, but just not all that great either.
Mar 20, 2009
Manatee
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An interesting,if clumsily written book that deals in hearsay and speculation rather than fact.Still,it is an important read for anyone interested in the fates of these abused and neglected creatures.
What Terrace and Fouts and other researchers did to the sensitive,gregarious and humanized chimps in their care is shocking.
What Terrace and Fouts and other researchers did to the sensitive,gregarious and humanized chimps in their care is shocking.
May 08, 2009
Petra X
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This book is scarcely about Nim Chimpsky at all, its far more about all the humans in his life. Its about the person who bought him, the many people who raised him as a human child - although they would never have given up on the job as they all did so quickly with Nim - and all the people who were part of the various experiments on him. Finally it is about the people who looked after him in his retirement.
As a book about an animal, animal behaviour and language acquisition, this bo More...
As a book about an animal, animal behaviour and language acquisition, this bo More...
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