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Linden's report is one of the most disturbing books I've ever read. It reveals how some of the superstars of the ape language experiments of the '70s, as well as several lesser-known primate research subjects, were callously discarded after the funding (and subsequently interest) dried up. With a few happy exceptions, their lives are now miserable -- or over.

It's as bad as the chimps from the space program, who after years of careful training were sold to laboratories for medical experiments. Most of Linden's subjects -- after being reared in human company and taught to use sign language or symbol-boards -- were sold to laboratories, placed in zoos, or attempted to return to the wild (with disasterous results).

The image of a despondent gorilla in a dank concrete zoo cage, signing desperately to passers-by "get me out, get me out!" will haunt me forever.

This book traces the aftermath for the subjects of the ape language experiments, especially what happened to the apes themselves. Since the publication of Linden's earlier book, Apes, Men and Language, Linden has had a special interest in the personalities, both human and ape of the participants in the ape language experiments. In this book, he revisits some of the key researchers, such as Roger Fouts, to see where the ape research has taken them. He interviews these researchers, trying to get some insight into the internal politics of ape research. He also traces the history of what happened to Washoe, Nim Chimpsky, and Koko following the famous language experiments that they participated in during the early part of their lives. He even makes a trip to Africa to see how well Lucy, a chimp who was raised in a human family, is getting along in a training program designed to help her adapt to life in the wild.

On reading the sub-title "The Legacy of the Ape Language Experiments", I had expected that the book would include some analysis or retrospective of what was learned from the ape experiments, and how this has affected our current understanding of ape language or human language. Linden, however, doesn't touch on this topic. Instead, he pretty much confines his reports to tracing the present whereabouts of the animals themselves. When it comes down to it, the informative content that Linden includes in this book could have been presented much more concisely, perhaps even in a single long feature magazine article. Indeed, in several places in the book, Linden seems to intentionally pad the material with irrelevant details, such as the make of the car he used when driving to visit an animal, perhaps to bring up the total word count to monograph level. Nevertheless, the language of the book is quite accessible to general readers and may be very interesting for people concerned about animal rights issues and informed consent amongst nonhuman participants in scientific research. On the other hand, readers who want to learn more about the linguistic implications of the ape language experiments might find other books on the topic more satisfying.

Eugene Linden wrote an early, highly optimistic book Apes, Men, and Language (Pelican)) about the various ape language experiments that were prominent in the 1970s. In this 1986 book, he chronicles the sad fate of many of the "famous" animals of such experiments (e.g., Washoe, Lucy, etc.), as well as the general failure of such experiments to produce the hoped-for results.

Linden states in the Preface, "I too, was swept up in the spirit of the times. But today ... we are still ignoring 'quasi-human mammals' that might tell us who we are. And back here on earth some of the apes involved in these experiments have paid a price as we have turned away from them."

He argues, "It is my feeling that the ascendancy of what might be called the negative view of ape language experiments followed not so much from any clear-cut reading of the data as from a loss of energy and heart among the proponents who had to contend with these ambiguities." He says of a highly-scrutinized film of Washoe the chimp, "Thus something as simple as twenty frames of a film designed to show Washoe's ability to make signs is used as proof of two different realities."

He details the sad fate of some of these animals, after funding for such programs evaporated. He concludes on the note, "what the wanderings of the sign-language-using apes show us is the dark side of humanism. Humanism, the notion that man is the noblest product of creation, responsible for the correct stewardship of the planet, carries with it a necessary blindness to the nature of evolution."