Truly engrossing and amazing story of Roger Fouts's work on language aquisition that began when he taught a young chimpanzee, Washoe, to use ASL. He traces the development of spoken language in humans to the gestural language of chimpanzees in the wild and demonstrates the close relation betwen ourselves and others in the ape family. He also gives a impassioned plea for an end to animal research under conditions of fear, pain, and severe deprivation. Some of this was hard to read. My guess is that a high percentage of animal research is not to advance science but rather scientists' careers. Researchers, including social research, should have to clear immense barriers to get permission for conducting studies with living subjects.