Nim Chimpsky

Starred review from December 17, 2007
In what is surely one of the most memorable and intelligent recent books about animal-human interaction, Hess (Lost and Found: Dogs, Cats and Everyday Heroes at a Country Animal Shelter
) tells the story of Nim Chimpsky, who in the 1970s was the subject of an experiment begun at the University of Oklahoma to find out whether a chimp could learn American Sign Language—and thus refute Noam Chomsky's influential thesis that language is inherent only in humans. Nim was sent to live with a family in New York City and taught human language like any other child. Hess sympathetically yet unerringly details both the project's successes and failures, its heroes and villains, as she recounts Nim's odyssey from the Manhattan town house to a mansion in the Bronx and finally back to Oklahoma, where he was bounced among various facilities as financial, personal and scientific troubles plagued the study. The book expertly shows why the Nim experiment was a crucial event in animal studies, but more importantly, Hess captures Nim's “legendary charm, mischievous sense of humor, and keen understanding of human beings.” This may well be the only book on linguistics and primatology that will leave its readers in tears over the life and times of its amazing subject.

February 1, 2008
In the 1970s, Herbert Terrace of Columbia University decided to challenge Noam Chomsky's widely accepted theory that the capacity for language is unique to the human species. Believing that a chimpanzee might acquire (sign) language ability in the proper reinforcing environment, Terrace undertook Project Nim and gave his male chimp the name of Nim Chimpskya clever pun on Chomsky's name. According to Hess, a journalist who writes about animals ("Lost and Found: Dogs, Cats, and Everyday Heroes at a County Animal Shelter"), the infant Nim was initially treated just like a human baby. He lived in a home with a large family, bonded with his human mother, wore clothes, and eventually attended schoolof sortsto learn American Sign Language (ASL). Hess then documents how after four years of being the famous and charismatic subject of a language experiment, Nim nearly became an anonymous subject of medical experiments. Nim's engrossing life story deserves a place next to those of Koko and Washoe, who died last October, and is recommended for all public libraries. For another perspective on Project Nim's controversial nature and its linguistic legacy, see Roger Fouts's "Next of Kin: What Chimpanzees Have Taught Me About Who We Are".Cynthia Knight, Hunterdon Cty. Lib., Flemington, NJ

Copyright 2008 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 1, 2008
Nim Chimpsky was born in a captive chimpanzee colony in 1973. Named as a play on Noam Chomsky, the famous linguist whose theory that language was a uniquely human trait the researchers hoped to disprove, Nim was to be raised in a human family and taught American Sign Language. This study on how language is acquired by humans would challenge the idea that only humans use language and blur or erase the line between human and nonhuman. But the study also created a chimpanzee with a foot in both worlds, neither fully chimp nor fully human, which further created a challenge for all of Nims caretakers and Nims own later salvation. Journalist Hess has written an affecting biography of one of the stars of primate research, from his beginnings as a two-week-old infant raised in a New York brownstone, through his various stays in research centers, his movement to a medical research facility, and his final home, at Cleveland Amorys animal sanctuary, Black Beauty Ranch. Nims story is a must for all libraries.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)