It's been said you can't judge a book by it's cover, and boy was that the case with this book. The title is a clever play on the name of Noam Chomsky, the famous linguist who asserted that language was an exclusively human trait. Couple this with a picture of an adorable little chimp wearing cute little red sweater, while reaching out to grasp a human hand, and I thought I was going to be reading a fun and amusing tract relating the methods in which some kind hearted and well meaning humans used to teach American Sign Language to Nim
Nothing could have been further from the truth. I was shocked and at times appalled by the physical and emotional hardships Nim was forced to endure. Some of these hardships were caused by simple cold indifference to the emotional needs of chimpanzees. In other cases the humans involved with Nim did have his best interests in mind but bureaucratic, political, and financial circumstances beyond their control further added to Nim's hardships.In many ways these cases were harder to read because the humans involved suffered as well.
That being the case, it is in my mind, absolutely inexcusable, if not down right criminal, to place a chimpanzee, who was raised in human homes, as a member of the family from infancy, into a primate medical research lab, after the language acquisition experiment was terminated.
The press eventually got wind of Nim's plight and the famous animal rights activist Cleveland Amory, got involved and was able to secure Nim's release. Nim was sent to Armory's ranch in Texas populated with numerous and varied hoofed animals such as burros, retired thourobreds, buffaloes, even elephants. But for over a year Nim was kept isolated in a small cage devoid of any sunshine or chimpanzee company. Nim suffered terribly under these conditions until somebody finally got the bright idea to provide him with another chimp for company. Duh ? Eventually three more chimps were brought to the ranch and by all accounts Nim was finally provided with the type of physical and emotional environment he needed to thrive. Unfortunately he only had a few years to enjoy them before suffering a massive heart attack.
It was a gut wrenching read , but well worth it. ( )

I read this because I’d just finished the novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves about a chimpanzee raised in a human family, and I happened to have this book around, apparently picked up while browsing bargain shelves some years ago. I’m sorry that I waited so long; it is excellent.

Nim Chimpsky was born in 1973 in the Institute for Primate Studies at the Oklahoma University, torn from his mother (who’d been through this before and was resigned to the routine) within weeks and sold to Columbia University for an experiment: would a chimpanzee raised in a human family communicate with a linguistic complexity that could be distinguished from mere mimicry. By then other experiments had established that chimpanzees lack the mechanics to vocalize human language, but can learn signs and symbols. Trouble ensued from the start. Nobody initially knew ASL so a window of developmental opportunity was missed. Nim did not live with the primary scientist; he lived with the family of a former student, and perspectives on caretaking differed, the rigorous requirements of a formal study vs the free-spirit style of the family. And chimpanzees occupy a space of almost-but-not-quite; not a pet, not a child. Nim was attached to the family and vice versa, engaging and clever, holding up his end of the deal with ASL, but his manners were far from impeccable. This was not unprecedented. Although chimpanzees are adorable as infants, within a few years they are too strong, too agile, too emotionally unconstrained for a household; they wreak havoc by accident or intention, and they bite. The family agonized but couldn’t cope, and Nim was moved to a university facility. In 1977, after further trouble and diminishing returns, the experiment was officially ended and he was sent back to Oklahoma University.

The book covers the two dozen plus years of Nim’s life as he is shunted around the country, caged and often isolated, a failed experiment and ruined for any other, his need for social interaction and communication not always recognized even by the most sympathetic caretakers. Just about everyone involved was interviewed for this book, which paints a detailed picture of affairs and animosities, a soap opera of psychologists. The chimpanzees seem quite civilized in comparison. Good things happen, and there are heroes you’ve never heard of, along with prominent names who are less savory than you might wish. An appendix gives a where-are-they-now (2008) update. An associated documentary film has numerous clips and summaries online.

(read 5 Nov 2013)

Nim Chimpsky was part of a rather scientifically dubious experiment intended to study the ability of chimps to learn language. As part of this experiment, he was raised by humans, lived with humans, and many ways acted like a human... except, of course, for the all ways in which he was still very much a chimp.

Nim's story is an interesting and often emotionally affecting one, and it raises a number of thought-provoking questions about the ethics and the underlying assumptions of experiments like this, and of animal experimentation in general. But Hess often seems much less interested in the chimp, or in the science, than she is in the researchers. A disproportionate amount of the book involves gossipy details of their personal lives: who had an out-of-control ego, who was feuding with whom, who was sleeping with whom, who was smoking pot, etc., etc. etc. (The answer, by the way, is that everybody was smoking pot and everybody was sleeping with everybody else. Because it was the 70s.) I suppose this might have been vaguely interesting, in a tawdry reality TV kind of way, if Hess were really bringing these people vividly to life with her prose, but mostly I just found it dull and kept wishing she'd get back to more worthwhile topics. ( )

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 book fails miserably - Vince Smith, Roger Fouts and Sue Savage-Rumbaugh have all written much more interestingly on these subjects. However, it was interesting to see the wheeling and dealing and politicking of the world that lives on research grants and where jealousy rather than co-operation is the name of the game for these scientists.

( )

The terribly sad story of Nim the chimp who was raised with human children and taught sign language, and then after a brief period in a chimp sanctuary, more or less abandoned to his fate. I devoured this immediately after watching Project Nim (2011), an extremely good documentary. I recommend both. ( )