I loved this book. I needed a feel-good book, after reading some pretty dark stuff, and I'm glad I came across this one.

Also, I just realized something: I've read a book about primates each year. It started with Lucy in 2010, then The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore last year, and finally, The One and Only Ivan this year.

Each one dealt with the anthropomorphization or humanization of a primate, to a certain degree. Lucy, arguably the most scientific of the three, dealt with the scientific, social, political and racial issues surrounding the creation of a human-bonobo hybrid. Bruno Littlemore was a philosophical romp through a chimp's psyche and showed how he, as a chimp, was always a human in a chimp's body, and how he slowly but willingly subsumed his "chimpness" in exchange for living not only amongst humans, but as a human.

My family tree spreads wide as well. I am a great ape, and you are a great ape, and so are chimpanzees and orangutans and bonobos, all of us distant and distrustful cousins.

I know this is troubling.

I too find it hard to believe there is a connection across time and space, linking me to a race of ill-mannered clowns.

Chimps. There's no excuse for them.

Ivan, a narrative based on a true story of a gorilla now living in Zoo Atlanta, is about a silverback named Ivan who lived in captivity for 9,855 days at a circus mall off Exit 8 of I-95 (yep, you read that right...a circus mall). His best friends were an elephant and a stray dog, who, like Ivan, knew no existence other than performing for humans three times a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. All the animals were humanized and given voices, but strangely enough, each animal retained something inherently true to their natures: Stella the elephant is hyperthymestic and is concerned about raising baby elephants the right way and being able to protect them; Bob the dog is both cynical about humans yet deep down, wants nothing more than to belong to someone, anyone, even if it's a stuffed animal. And Ivan, he who knew theoretically what it meant to be a silverback, but who hadn't been around other gorillas since he was a baby, he who had forgotten, yet still yearned for the grooming hands of another gorilla, who dreamt of mangoes and raisins, of bugs and nests, of playing tag and playing in the mud. (view spoiler)[By his own machinations and the love of a little girl, the circus mall is eventually closed down and he and the rest of the animals are eventually moved to Zoo Atlanta. But because he's lived in captivity for most of his life, he doesn't know how to be or act like a gorilla and has to be re-inculcated into gorilla life before he could live among his own kind. (hide spoiler)]

Humans always smell odd when change is in the air. Like rotten meat, with a hint of papaya.

Ivan is humanized, it's true, and the author admits to wanting to give him a voice. Both Lucy and Bruno strove to have a voice, one that was more human than animal; one that glorified humanity and all that was good about humans like culture and innovation, art and technology; one that tried to bridge the gap between being identified as human and what it meant to live as a second class citizen, as an animal, in a human world. They tried to rationalize why humanity was better than being a chimp or a bonobo, or why they had to subsume their natural animal selves to become who they wanted to be.

Is there anything sweeter than the touch of another as she pulls a dead bug from your fur?

Oddly enough, Ivan never lost sight of the fact that he was a gorilla. And maybe that was the whole point: he may have been the loneliest gorilla in the world, but he remained a gorilla and never became a quasi-human who expected to reap the benefits of humankind. He protected his family (albeit a strange family composed of elephants and a dog), as a silverback is supposed to do. In retaining his identity, even if he didn't fully understand what that identity meant, he actually came closer to achieving what both Bruno and Lucy failed to do: he became sympathetic. He became a little bit more human.

"Calm down," Bob says. "You're behaving like a chimp."

I think I will try to read a primate book each year, just so that I can keep in touch with my great apeness.